Website Design Proposal Template
Building websites for clients can be an incredibly lucrative and therefore, a competitive profession. That’s why we’ve worked with lawyers to create a simple website proposal template (Word and PDF) to help you win more business.
Free Website Proposal Template and Sample
Building websites for clients can be an incredibly lucrative and therefore, a competitive profession. That’s why we’ve worked with lawyers to create a simple website proposal template (Word and PDF) to help you win more business.
What’s in this template?
- • Cover letter
- • Services table
- • Payment terms
Click below to access our website proposal template
What is a website proposal?
We live in a digital world, yet, businesses are still slow to adapt to the technology revolution.
Approximately 64% of small businesses have a website, which presents an opportunity for service providers to help design and develop websites for a growing market. This is not to mention all of the companies that want to rebuild part of or all of their website to improve the customer experience.
A website proposal is a business document web developers, and designers use to pitch their services to prospective clients. This website project proposal captures details about a webmaster approach, services, and payment terms. Let’s look at each component in more detail.
DISCLAIMER: We are not lawyers or a law firm and we do not provide legal, business or tax advice. We recommend you consult a lawyer or other appropriate professional before using any templates or agreements from this website.
Grab a copy of our Website Proposal Template (Free Example for Download)
As a web developer and designer, sending and pitching proposals is not likely something you thought you’d be doing as part of your job. That’s why we’ve created a simple proposal template to help save you time while maintaining professionalism in your client dealings.
Click below to download our website proposal template
Elements of a great website design and development proposal
Below are three key elements to a well-formulated website design proposal template.
1. Cover letter
While a cover letter is optional, it’s a nice touch to enhance your proposal template. The goal of a cover letter is to succinctly communicate relevant experience, philosophy, and skills to show prospective clients that you know what you’re doing.
You can either include a cover letter in your website proposal template doc or send it in the body of your email message. Either way, make sure you put your best foot forward to highlight what makes you competent at building websites.
2. Services
Your website development proposal is an opportunity to show clients all of the excellent services you offer to help them achieve their digital goals.
Take the time to map out all of your relevant offerings and even include some additional options that the client didn’t think of but would appreciate.
Detailing your services in your proposal also sets the tone for a new client relationship. Straight off the bat, you’re drawing a line and communicating what you can and can’t do.
This is critical to avoid “scope creep,” where a client continually asks for you to do more work that wasn’t included in the original agreement.
3. Payment terms
As a creative professional or agency, you have a few options when it comes to how to structure your payment terms.
You could charge progress payments, a deposit, upfront fees, or an hourly rate. How you present your payment conditions is entirely depending on your cash flow and type of clients.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s common practice to charge a deposit before the project commences, and the outstanding balance upon completion.
If the website is a small job, you may opt to skip the deposit and charge payment at the end of the project.
Grab a copy of our Website Proposal Template (Free Download)
As a web developer and designer, sending and pitching proposals is not likely something you thought you’d be doing as part of your job. That’s why we’ve created a simple proposal template to help save you time while maintaining professionalism in your client dealings.
Click below to download our website proposal template
How to use a website proposal template to win more business
Website design and development jobs are in demand, which comes with fierce competition. So while having a website proposal template puts you in a better situation than it would if you didn’t, you need to do more to stand out and win clients.
Sounds good in theory. But how do you actually stand out?
It comes down to relevancy.
When it comes down to it, prospective clients want to know if you have the skills to help them get the results they desire.
This means you need to go everything you can to uncover what truly matters to your clients when it comes to housing a website.
Here are eight questions to help you unlock your client’s needs:
- • What are the 3-5 websites you consider to be competition?
- • What isn't working on your current website?
- • How would you describe your target audience in two sentences?
- • When are you hoping to have your website complete by?
- • How does your business make money?
- • What makes you different from your competitors?
- • What would success look like for this website project?
- • What features must your website include?
Use a combination of these questions to get to the core of what your prospect wants. Not only that but what would a successful website mean for their bottom line?
Once you have the data, use your website proposal to align your relevant skills and experiences with your client’s deepest desires.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ about Website Proposals
While you can certainly communicate your value for a potential website project through messages, email, or verbal methods, we recommend creating a professional proposal to describe your offerings.
Having a proposal shows clients that you take your work seriously and are thorough in your approach. A website proposal gives you more credibility and ultimately increases your chance of securing a job.
Having a proposal shows clients that you take your work seriously and are thorough in your approach. A website proposal gives you more credibility and ultimately increases your chance of securing a job.
Depending on the size of a project, the content in a proposal can vary greatly. However, some elements are essential to every proposal, including:
- Information about your web design/development business
- The services you offer
- How you get paid
Yes, absolutely. As mentioned above, the key to maximizing opportunities is developing a relevant proposal, which means tailoring the content to each client project. We’ve made our template in Word so you can modify the document to your requirements.
Proposals and contracts, while similar, are two different documents.
Proposals are effectively a marketing tool to pitch your services to potential clients, while contracts are formal documents that communicate the terms and conditions of a web project.
Proposals are effectively a marketing tool to pitch your services to potential clients, while contracts are formal documents that communicate the terms and conditions of a web project.
document preview
Website Design Proposal
Website Design Proposal
Introduction
Your company needs a digital presence in this digital world.
A good website can exponentially increase your reach, while working for you 24/7, virtually for free.
Websites also give you the benefit of a professional business email, and let you take control over your customer communication through blogs, knowledge bases, and contact pages.
However, a bad website can give the impression of an unprofessional company, one that cannot keep up with the current technology, or one that doesn’t care enough about its image. Your website should also be continuously updated to show your clients the information they need today, and to keep them coming for more.
It’s not just a matter of creating a website, it’s a matter of creating the right website.
Your Needs
Your company needs to provide your users with the right information, and to market the right products.
Here’s what we’ve found about your current needs:
Brand Awareness
In a competitive industry like yours, a website can give you the boost you need to improve your brand awareness and reputation.
Your current website doesn’t fully represent your company values and mission, and customers may not get a clear idea of your company’s personality.
Your website must follow the tone you want to establish with your customers, as well as provide clear ways for them to connect with you.
Traffic Generation
By optimizing your website, you can get more organic traffic through search engines than the traffic you’re currently getting.
You can also target more keywords to attract the potential clients that are more likely to buy. Once the clients are on your website, the website needs to separate them depending on the likelihood of purchase.
To achieve this, your website needs a proper funnel, so you can generate the leads you need, and cater to their needs to increase the chance of conversion.
Customer Connection
Your website needs to develop a connection with your customers, and give them a reason to return. It should immediately give your users the perfect idea of the kind of company you have
To achieve this, your website must be easy to find and easy to navigate. It should also be constantly updated to give your users timely information.
Solution - Your Website
This is the kind of website you need developed:
Home Page
Your home page needs to load fast, and needs to immediately provide the right information to your users.
It will have your company’s color scheme, a modern design, and the calls to action you need for users to buy your products, sign up for your newsletter, get free trials, and learn more about your products.
It will also have the full menu of your website, with all pages at a maximum of three clicks away.
Mailing List
Your website will have a fully automated mailing list, where customers can leave their email for more information. This mailing list will connect with your business email provider, to automatically load your new users and their subscription information.
About Us Page
This page is vital to create a connection with many customers. In it, users can see who’s behind your business, and can put a face to the company.
The page also helps you connect with users by redirecting them to the right person of the right department.
Case Studies
Better than listing your most notable clients, is to tell people how your company has helped them.
Case studies let people find the kind of problem they’re having, and envision how your company can help them. These case studies will be extremely helpful for years to come.
Products and Services
Your users may already have an idea of what your company does, but your website will tell them what you can do for them in context.
We’ll organize a list of your company’s products and services so your customers can decide which ones they’re interested in learning more about, and can browse to their satisfaction.
We’ll also provide the pricing in a place that’s easy to see, making sure your users can see the products and their benefits right before the pricing, to increase conversion chances.
Finally, we’ll put the call to action at the bottom of each page, so your users can easily convert once they’re ready.
Deliverables & Retainer Services
This is what we’re offering to your company, and the investment recommended:
Research:
We start by identifying the main goals of your website design. With the help of you and your team, we land ideas and translate them into actionable and measurable goals.
It may be useful for you and your team to write out your goals in preparation for the meeting, and set up a summary of what you want to see in the website, who it’s for, how many users it will be in contact with, and what the primary goal is.
Deliverable: In-detail result projection. Three different mock-ups of your page design.
Timeframe: 3 days
Price:
Website Design:
We’ll start by developing a design according to your brand’s image.
We’ll go through you each step of the way, ensuring the design is up to your standards. We’ll offer you different corporate art styles, showing you how they cater to your audiences, so you can choose the one that best fits with your business.
Finally, we develop three different page designs according to your specifications, and show them to you in the shape of a mock-up, so you see your new website in action.
Deliverable: In-detail result projection. Three different mock-ups of your page design.
Timeframe: One week
Price:
Website Development:
Once a mock-up and design style is chosen, we’ll start developing your website accordingly. This will include the development and implementation of everything listed under “Your Website”.
We’ll reach you for your approval at each step of the way, to ensure everything is being developed to your needs.
Deliverable: In-detail result projection. Three different mock-ups of your page design.
Timeframe: 3 days
Research:
Website Training:
When the website is implemented, we will train you on how to use your website. You can choose up to 5 more people to get trained with you.
This training will show you how to use each feature, how to add or remove items, how to modify every page, and how to use the website’s integrations.
Deliverable: Completed training
Timeframe: 2-4 hours
Price: Free of charge
Website Launch
Once the website is fully developed and you and your team are fully trained on how to use it, we’ll launch your website.
The launch process is fully supervised to ensure success. We typically launch during the weekend; that way, if there are any issues, we’ll take care of them without losing too much traffic. We’ve launched websites hundreds of times, so you can rest easy knowing we’ll take care of everything and avoid any headaches for you.
We’ll monitor your website’s health, ensuring there isn’t any downtime for any reason. We also supervise the navigation flow to make sure all old links redirect to the new page.
We’ll contact you first thing on Monday to give you an analysis of the first weekend, and to let you know if we had to fix any issues.
Deliverable: Page online
Timeframe: Upon completion of payments
Price: Free of charge
Our Process
Here’s how we tackle website design:
Step 1: Initial Interview and Planning
We start by sitting down with you and your team to learn what you expect from your website. We learn about your pain points and take notes of your needs.
In this meeting, we show you about our competition research, so you can see how similar companies are currently dealing with similar issues, and how you can do it better.
Finally, we translate all of that into actionable points of website creation, to ensure the right reason is behind each creation step.
Step 2: Website layout
Once we know what you want out of your website, we can start planning how your website will work and look like.
To do this, we create a sketch of your most important pages, so you can see where everything will be, and how everything connects.
Although these sketches aren’t too detailed yet, they’ll give you an idea of how everything looks like, and what navigation is like.
Step 3: Content creation
Once the design is approved, we focus on developing the website’s content. Our experienced copywriters will develop the written content for your website, all according to your company’s tone and personality.
Our designers develop support images and icons, to fully flesh out your website and your content.
Our web designers, on the other hand, will take care of the technical part of web development. Data scientists will set up your website’s analytics page and integrate your website to the software you’re already using. They’ll also take care of interlinking and of linking any old link to your new website.
All content is SEO-friendly to ensure search engines like Google can easily find your pages, file them, and show them to your audience.
Step 4: Design and Development
Now, we focus on developing those sketches into a fully-fledged design. This design already includes your color scheme, your company artwork, and your visual style.
We’ll use placeholder text when needed so you get a full idea of how the final page will look like, even as we continue developing content.
Step 5: Testing
Once your website is ready, it’s time to evaluate how well it works. Our Quality Management team will go through the website, looking for any imperfections to be ironed out. They perform to completion the most common navigation tasks that your users will be performing. This will let them know of any potential error.
Our team will also look into potential issues that many happen in the future. To do this, we go through a checklist based on past learnings and common mistakes, to ensure your website is working before we start using it.
Step 6: Launch and optimization
When the website has passed all tests and our team makes sure it’s up to our standards, we launch your website.
We closely monitor your website throughout the first few days, looking for any potential error or issue, and checking bounce rates and navigation time to ensure your users are having a proper experience.
Once we make sure your website isn’t experiencing any issues, we audit your website once every month for 12 months, ensuring we patch any minor issues, creating backups, updating content, and ensuring security.
Project Timeline
Here’s the timeline of your website’s development:
- Initial Interview and Planning: Up to one week.
- Website layout: Up to one week.
- Design: From one to two weeks.
- Content creation: From one to two weeks.
- Testing: From three to five days.
- Launch and optimization: Five days to launch and test, one audit per month for twelve months after launching.
In total, your website takes from three to six weeks to develop from the ground up, giving you full support for the next twelve months after launch.
Investment and ROI
We price your website development according to the amount of work, like coding, content creation, and graphic design.
Here’s how it looks like:
| Website Design and Development (this covers every design and development step, and can be divided into a 12-payment plan) | $4’990 (single payment) |
|---|---|
| Website Hosting (this covers the cost of your personalized domain and email addresses) | $35 per month |
| Website’s Monthly Audit (this audit shows you traffic, bug corrections, navigational details, and more) | $25 per month |
Why Should You Choose Us?
With hundreds of successful website launches from small to large companies across the world, we have the expertise to ensure your website is fully developed and making money as you need it to.
But don’t take our word for it.
Developing a successful website
“Our website looked like something you’d find in Geocities,” said Linda Carter, the owner of The Coffee Tree. “We needed a brand new website that showed we’re more than your average coffee shop, we’re part of the community.”
Our Solution
After taking one look at the website, we agreed with Linda: she needed a brand new website. We sat down with Linda and stripped down her coffee shop image to its basis: the logo, the color scheme, and the mission and vision.
Then, we got to work. We developed a new website that would work for her, 24/7. Her website was to include her menu, the different coffee roasts she manages, her working hours, her staff, and even her dog.
Linda had told us how, although her cafe was doing ok, she was barely selling her ground coffee bags, and how she wanted to improve her sales online. To achieve it, we developed an online store, as well as a small, interactive test so users could choose the kind of coffee beans that they’d like the most, by just answering a few questions.
We also developed SEO-friendly content so users could find her website by looking for keywords like “coffee beans around me”, and “ground coffees near me”, so she could sell coffee locally.
We developed a “The Coffee Tree in the Community” page, where we showed photos and stories of the coffee shop participating in community events, funding charities, and giving free water to the town’s marathon.
We also made sure to list the apps that the coffee shop works with right along the working hours, so users could order with one click.
We even touched up her logo to modernize it without losing the coffee shop’s brand and name.
Our Results
After less than two months, her ground coffee online sales alone had already paid for the website. Linda had to speak to her coffee producers to increase her monthly orders to keep up with the demand.
She also reported a 35% increase in orders online, and an influx of new customers arriving at the coffee shop for both ground coffee and espresso drinks.
“This website has surpassed every expectation I had. We’re selling more ground coffee than we can buy, and the website design is so good, you can practically smell the coffee through the screen.”
-Linda Carter, owner of The Coffee Tree
Our guarantee
With an investment, there’s always a risk. We, however, know this risk is worth taking, and are willing to put our money where our mouth is, by removing the risk factor from the equation.
Our guarantee is quite simple: If your new website doesn’t increase your online conversion rate by 25% in the first three months, you don’t need to pay for the website.
Let’s say your current online conversion rate is of 10%. We guarantee that, by the end of those three months, your conversion rate would be at least of 12.5%, if not more.
This guarantee is only valid when following the project terms listed below:
Project Terms
This Website Design Proposal (“Proposal”) is being made between [Customer Name] located at [Address] and [Company Name] on [Date]. [Customer Name] and [Company Name] may also be referred to as “Party” or together as the “Parties”.
Description of the Services:
[Customer Name] and [Company Name] will decide on the description of services before signing the contract, and [Customer Name] may update the scope of the services by filing a “Change Order” form and getting approval from [Company Name] to change this contract.
More services and changes may generate extra fees.
Cost & Payment
Total cost of services:
Amount due at signing:
Amount due upon completion:
Timeline:
Preliminary design completion date:
Review date:
Final review:
This final review must include written feedback on the website.
Completion:
Copyright Notice
A Copyright notice that states [Company Name] and its logo will be displayed on the bottom of each page of your website, along with a link to [Company Name]’s website.
Intellectual Property
[Customer Name] will own the website [Company Name] will design, along with the vistuals, the written content, and any graphic art developed for it. [Company Name] isn’t required to keep copies of the website or fragments of it. [Customer Name] will not hold [Company Name] responsible for any third-party claims.
[Company name] will own any and all copyrightable work, ideas, products, inventions, and other information created in connection with the services being provided, and will remain legal owners of them, not holding [customer name] responsible for any third-party claims.
Confidentiality
[Company Name] will not share or disclose any confidential information belonging to [Customer Name] without a written consent. This may include but isn’t limited to trade secrets, payment information, and any other information not publicly available.
Assignment
The Parties will not assign responsibilities they have under this Agreement to anyone else unless both Parties show agreement to the assignment in writing.
Contract Termination
If [Customer Name] decides to terminate this contract, they may do so by providing a fifteen (15) day written notice and paying [Company Name] for all completed services.
If either Party fails to follow through with their responsibilities or obligations under this Agreement, the other Party can end this Agreement by giving a five (5) day written notice. This Agreement will automatically terminate if and when both Parties have performed all of their obligations under the Agreement and all payments have been made.
Acceptance
Please sign below to indicate acceptance of this agreement:
[Customer Name]
Name:
Signature:
Date:
[Customer Name]
Name:
Signature:
Date:
Next Steps
If you want to start creating your website, here’s what you need to do:
- Review the proposal in its entirety.
- Sign the fields above.
- Wait for our contact regards your invoice details and billing.
Related Proposals and Templates
Grab a copy of our Website Proposal Template (Free Download)
As a web developer and designer, sending and pitching proposals is not likely something you thought you’d be doing as part of your job. That’s why we’ve created a simple proposal template to help save you time while maintaining professionalism in your client dealings.
Click below to download our website proposal template
