What to prepare before talking to a studio

A conversation about a website usually starts the same way. The client asks how much it costs, the studio answers with a range from X to Y, and both sides walk away dissatisfied. The client did not get a number, the studio did not get a brief.

The reason is not that somebody is being evasive. What a website costs is decided by choices nobody has made yet, and until they are made, any figure would be guesswork.

Why a studio will not quote a price straight away

Unlike an item on a shelf, a website has no set price. Two companies in the same industry can end up with sites that differ threefold in cost, and both estimates will be honest.

The difference is created by things that have usually not been discussed at the first meeting.

• The number of unique layouts. Ten pages on three templates and ten pages each with its own design are different projects. The order of the design stages is covered in our article on website design from brief to mockups.
• How ready the content is. The text and photographs exist, or they have to be produced from scratch.
• Integrations. The site simply displays information, or it exchanges data with an accounting system.
• Languages. One version or three, and who does the translation.
• The deadline. A normal schedule or a compressed one, where work runs in parallel and costs more.

A detailed breakdown of these factors is in our article on what determines the price of a website. This one covers what exactly to bring so that the studio can assess those factors.

A simple example of the difference. A company asks for a site with a catalog of services. In the first case there are eight services, each described in a paragraph, with fixed prices. In the second there are also eight services, but each has three tiers, the price depends on volume, and the page needs a calculator. The two briefs sound identical and the second is twice the work. Until the studio knows which of the two is yours, it has to either quote a range or say nothing.

The purpose of the site in one sentence

The most useful thing you can prepare is an answer to why you need a website. “To have one” is not an answer. Describe what specifically should happen.

A phrasing like “we want inquiries from search for our installation service” gives a studio more than three pages describing the company. From it you can immediately see which pages are needed, what has to be on them and what to measure afterwards.

• Bring in inquiries. Then what matters is the path from the landing page to the form, and load speed.
• Build trust. Then you need case studies, documents, the team and the company’s history.
• Sell a specific product. Then you need a catalog, a cart and payment handling.
• Serve existing customers. Then the center of gravity shifts to an account area and documents.
• Hire people. Then you need a careers section that works, not a page with an email address.

There can be more than one purpose, but one of them is the main one. That is what determines where the bulk of the money goes.

It also helps to name what you will measure the result by. Inquiries per month, calls from the site, contacts from a particular region. Without that, six months later the conversation about whether the site is any good turns into an exchange of impressions. With a metric in mind it rests on numbers.

What to show instead of describing

Design cannot be described in words. “Modern, stylish, not like everyone else” sounds the same in any industry and means nothing.

Examples you like

Collect three to five sites that appeal to you. They can be competitors, companies from a different industry, or simply pages you consider well made.

Write one sentence for each about what exactly you like. Instead of “it looks nice”, be specific, for example “it is clear what they do within five seconds” or “the catalog is convenient, availability and price are visible immediately”. That one sentence works better than an hour of discussion.

Examples that definitely do not fit

The second list is shorter but no less useful. Two or three sites you dislike, with the reason. It saves you from the situation where the studio brings a mockup, the client says it is not right, and cannot explain why.

Scope and structure in rough form

There is no need to prepare a specification. A simple list of pages is enough, even handwritten.

Home, services, case studies, about, contact. Then the refinements: how many services, does each have its own page, is a blog needed, is there a partner section. Such a list takes fifteen minutes and makes the estimate several times more precise.

The typical set of pages for a company site is covered in our article on corporate website structure, and it is convenient to take that as a base and cross out what you do not need. Once the list exists, the studio can see the scope and price the work as a corporate website project rather than guess.

Also mark which pages are critical for you and which can wait for a second phase. That makes it possible to split the project into stages if the budget is limited.

Content, access and existing systems

The next block of input is the dullest and the one that most often wrecks deadlines.

The most common delay is text. Development runs to schedule, the design is ready, the build is ready, and the pages are filled with “text to follow”. So the question of who writes the text and by what date should be settled in the very first conversation.

There are three options here and all of them work. The client writes, because they know the product best, and the studio only edits. The studio writes from your input, and that is a separate line in the quote. Or a middle path, where you supply the facts as a list and a copywriter shapes the wording. There is only one bad option, which is postponing the question until it surfaces during the build. How to approve the copy itself is covered separately in our article on landing page copy and how to approve it.

Access is a similar story. The domain, the mail and the old site are often registered to somebody who stopped working with you years ago. This is worth finding out before the start, because recovering access to a domain sometimes takes longer than the whole build.

What to collect from the current site

If a site is already running, it carries accumulated search rankings, page addresses that other sites link to, and statistics gathered over several years. All of that can be lost in a single day if nobody thinks about it in advance.

The preparation comes down to three things. Export the list of addresses of every existing page. Check in the search console which of them actually receive traffic. Make sure the analytics account belongs to you rather than to a previous contractor. These three things matter more at a first meeting than any design preferences. They show what has to be preserved and what can be dropped without loss, and that feeds into the structure of the new site and into the estimate.

Budget and deadlines without playing coy

Clients often avoid naming a budget, fearing the studio will simply adjust its price to fit. The fear is understandable, but the consequence is the opposite of what is intended.

When the budget is unknown, the studio proposes a middle option. It may turn out twice as expensive as your expectations or, conversely, more modest than what you were prepared to invest. Either way the time is wasted.

A stated budget works differently. It determines what exactly the site will include for that amount. A company site on a ready-made template with a basic set of pages costs from $1,000 to $2,000, one with a custom design costs from $2,000 to $3,000, and an accounting integration is priced separately, from $500. Beyond that the figure grows with the scope rather than on its own.

The same goes for deadlines. “We needed it yesterday” and “we need it before the trade show in March” are different briefs. The second lets you plan the order of work and possibly launch some pages ahead of the rest.

What to do if there is no budget yet

Sometimes a client genuinely does not know how much they are prepared to invest, and that is fine. In that case it helps to invert the question: not “How much does a website cost?” but “What can be built for the amount you are certain about right now?”.

That approach produces a workable plan even with limited money. First a basic set of pages goes live and starts bringing inquiries. Later, once the site is working, the deferred parts are added. It is slower than one large project but cheaper than the mistake of spending everything and getting the wrong thing.

Who on your side makes decisions

The question sounds like a formality and derails more projects than technical difficulties do.

If one person approves the design, work runs to schedule. If four people look at it and each has the right to say they do not like it, the number of revision rounds grows unpredictably.

• One person responsible. They gather opinions inside the company and give the studio a single agreed position.
• A fixed number of revision rounds. How many rounds are included in the work and what goes beyond.
• A deadline for feedback. How many days to review a mockup, otherwise the project stalls on your side.
• Who signs off the result. The same person or a director, and against what list.

This saves time for both sides. What to check when you accept a finished site is covered in our article on the website handover checklist, and it is worth looking at before the start so you know how it all ends.

What the studio will ask you in return

The conversation runs both ways, and the questions from the studio are predictable too. Prepare your answers in advance.

• Who are your customers. Businesses or individuals, from which region, how they usually find a service like yours.
• What makes you different from competitors. Skip the slogans and answer with facts that can be shown on a page.
• What brings inquiries now. Advertising, referrals, marketplaces, the old site.
• What you have tried that did not work. This saves you from repeating somebody else’s mistakes at your expense.
• Who will run the site after launch. Your employee, the studio or nobody, and that determines how complex the admin panel should be.

The last question is worth thinking through in advance. A site nobody looks after ages faster than expected, and it is better to put that in the plan from the outset.

What a normal first conversation looks like

For comparison, here is roughly how an hour that goes well is spent.

For the first fifteen minutes the studio listens to you talk about the business. What you sell, to whom, how customers arrive now, what bothers you about that. The site itself barely comes up in this part.

The next twenty minutes are about the purpose and the structure. What the visitor should do, which sections are needed, which questions customers ask most often. This is also where the examples you brought are reviewed.

Then the constraints. Deadlines, budget, what material already exists, who takes decisions, whether there is a current site and what to do with it.

And the last minutes are about how the work is organized. The stages, what is shown at each one, how many revision rounds are included, what happens after launch.

If the conversation goes into technology from the first minute, into a list of platforms and a description of how good the studio is, you will take almost nothing useful out of it.

Mistakes made at this stage

Mistakes in the first conversation cost both time and money, and the same ones come up on project after project.

• Bringing somebody else’s specification. A document found online or borrowed from an acquaintance describes a different business and only confuses the estimate.
• Asking for “something like this site”. Without explaining what exactly appeals, that is an instruction to copy somebody else’s layout rather than build your own.
• Listing features instead of goals. “We need a calculator and a customer account” without an answer to why gives an expensive site with unused sections.
• Hiding the current site. Even if it is outdated, it shows the accumulated content, the structure and the rankings worth keeping.
• Talking without the decision maker. Two weeks later it turns out the director sees the project differently, and everything starts again.

None of these is fatal, but each adds anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

What you get from a conversation like that

If all the input is gathered, an hour of conversation produces the following.

• A list of work. What exactly is in the project, broken into stages.
• An estimate with reasoning. It is itemized, so you can see and discuss each line.
• A timeline with an order. What is built first and when the first visible result appears.
• A list of what is needed from you. With dates, so the project does not stall for want of text.
• An understanding of what can wait. Which work is not critical for launch and moves to a second phase.

If after the conversation you received only a figure with no breakdown, that is a reason to ask more questions. To assess the studio itself, use our criteria for choosing a web agency. If you are commissioning a site from outside Ukraine, how such a conversation works across time zones, and how payments and access are handled, is covered in our article on working with a Ukrainian web studio.

Conclusions

A precise estimate depends on the quality of the input more than on the studio’s experience. Purpose in one sentence, a list of pages, examples, content readiness, a budget and one person responsible on your side. That set takes a couple of hours to assemble and saves weeks.

Uncertainty costs more than any error in the estimate. A project that begins without a page list and without an answer to who writes the text almost always overruns on both time and budget, and both sides will be convinced it was the other one’s fault.

If you are about to commission a website, do not rush to ask for a quote. Write down the purpose in one sentence, a simple list of pages and three examples of sites you like. Send that to us together with the address of your current site if you have one. We will reply with the work broken into stages and an estimate line by line rather than a single figure. If your input shows that improving the existing site would do the job, the estimate will cover that improvement instead.