The 7 sections you need to have in your website design proposal to win clients free template

Writing web design proposals is a tedious and monotonous process. It’s a lot of work that may not pay off in the end.

You, like most creatives, probably prefer to spend your time working rather than pushing prospects through sales funnels. . But if you don’t take the time to work on your proposals, then you and your business are in trouble.

As a skilled designer, you are more than capable of designing websites, but how comfortable are you selling them? Are you winning as much business as you could?

Your project proposal can be a deciding factor in landing design projects, so mastering the trade is critical. In this post, we’ll walk you through the eight sections that every website design proposal should have, and give you a free template you can use to start winning more work today.

Let’s move on:

• Designing your introduction
• Introducing the problem being solved
• Explaining your solution
• Giving an overview of the project
• Describe your process
• Explain next steps
• Determine cost
• Tips and tricks for submitting your proposal

1 . Introduce Yourself

Project proposals are supposed to help clients understand what they’re getting into, not overwhelm them with details.

(Design your proposal using InVision Freehand.)

Your introduction should (lightly) reflect the conversations you should have already had about customer needs. Information you might want to include is:

• Name of client
• Title of project (the problem being solved)
• Name and title of your point of contact
• Your name and title
• Submission date

This is an example of a good introductory section:

2. Problem Overview

After introducing yourself to the prospect, the first element that follows in a successful web design proposal is the problem overview. The client should read this and know:

• There is a problem or opportunity for your business that you are not taking advantage of.
• You have a complete and thorough understanding of their problems and their needs.

Understanding the core issues facing your client will help you define both your responsibilities and the scope of the project. Doing this gives the client a reason to believe in you and your process.

The best web design proposals are those that put the client’s needs and needs at the center of attention and make the prospect feel and believe that you can solve their problems. For example:

3. Solution Overview

After spending time researching the company’s history and talking with stakeholders, you should understand your problem and start formulating a solution. It is your responsibility to explain the business benefits of your design practice.

(See InVision’s design maturity model)

Using business language to By explaining the positive aspects of design impact on your problems, you will position yourself as a key figure in driving the success of your business in the future. For example, you can demonstrate value by explaining how the new design can increase revenue and enhance your brand.

Tip: When presenting your ideas and possible solutions, try to anticipate the conversations the prospect is likely to have within your organization, what language they are using, and let your news section solution present a deep dive into your knowledge of your problem. Going back to our previous example:

4. Deliverables

This is where you’ll need to describe exactly what you’ll deliver as part of the project.

This is an important section, but more for what you’re excluding than what you’re including. Scope drift is a common problem in website design, especially if you work with relatively inexperienced small businesses, and it can only be prevented by setting clear goals and expectations.

For example, you might agree to design them on a site website, but then realize they don’t have a logo. What do you do for a living? You need a logo to put on your website, so do you design it?

Here’s an example:

5. The Process Overview

Once you have clearly defined what the problem, solution, and results are, the next section will dive deeper into the execution and describe how you are going to build the website and solve it. the customer’s problem.

In this section, you’ll want to:

• Outline the different steps in the process
• Outline a basic timeline, so the customer client knows when to expect each deliverable
• Describe your expectations of the client so they know what to do and when to help keep the project on track

The design process and building a website looks different for every client and depends on many different factors.The worst thing you can do is miss a client-specific step in your schematic and have to reset their expectations mid-project, inevitably wasting time and money.

To help you avoid this, here’s a list Here are some typical steps in the website development process to consider:

• Research (users, competitors, etc.)
• Wireframing
• Sitemaps
• Initial designs plus any revisions
• Development
• CMS installation and configuration
• Browser and device QA/testing
• Training

Here is an example of a detailed section of the process:

6. The Cost

This final section is often where a web design proposal is won or lost.

Before you start working on your proposal, ask your client what their budget is total. While this can be scary and you may get the feeling that you are trespassing on some line, you are not. It’s not uncommon for a prospect to show up for offers with a predetermined number in mind.

(Make your client’s job faster with InVision Craft.)

Openly discussing the prospect’s budget before creating the proposal is a win-win scenario for both of you. This conversation will help you develop a budget for the project, as well as let you know whether or not the project is financially worth it to you before you do the hard work of developing a proposal.

While it might be a guess and guess your budget, more often than not you will cross the line and be out of the game completely. Or you’ll underestimate yourself so much that you’ll leave a ton of money.

Once you have the client’s budget, your web design proposal should present the cost breakdown nice and clear. path to your prospect.

It’s often helpful to relate it to the process you’ll be going through (particularly if you’re charging an hourly rate or a project rate that’s based on hours). This makes it very easy for prospects to understand how different aspects of the project come together to form the total cost.

Here’s an example:

You can use tools like InVision Studio, InDesign, or even Photoshop to simulate good pricing tables like the one above, or you can create a more basic one in Word or Google Docs if that’s where you’re writing your proposal.

Alternatively, dedicated proposal tools like Qwilr makes it easy to create beautiful price tag layouts like this one. You can even make certain sections or line items optional so your prospect can select if they want that extra upsell (i.e. submission to search engines), which can help you earn a little more on each project.

7. Call to Action

Now that all the information is available, including deliverables, process, and costs, it’s time to prompt the prospect to take the next steps: accept their proposal and start the project, t.

Ideally, you’ll want to give them a way to accept and approve the proposal right away. If you’re submitting your proposal as a PDF, Word, or Google Doc, this can be a bit tricky as they don’t actually have built-in accept or sign functions.

To resolve this, you could do any of the following things:

• Ask the prospect to send you an email saying something like “Please continue”
• Link to the contract (or other binding agreement) in a tool like Docusign, which gives them the ability to accept and sign.

Alternatively, if you use a dedicated proposal tool, it will allow your prospect to accept and sign the proposal right there from within

Here’s an example:

Whatever you do, don’t force your prospect to print your proposal, sign it, scan it, and send it back. That takes a long time, especially if someone doesn’t have immediate access to a printer, and research shows that it dramatically increases the time it takes to sign documents.

(Plus, it’s not green.)

Additional Tips

Submit your proposal as a web page

If you are submitting your proposals in a document format such as PDF, you may be doing something wrong. After all, the PDF was invented in the same decade as the Palm Pilot, and I can’t imagine you’d still be using a Palm Pilot.

By submitting your proposal as a web page instead of a PDF, You get the following benefits:

• Responsibility: Web pages are responsive, which means they look great on all desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Since most emails are opened on mobile devices these days, you ensure that your potential customers have a great experience with your proposal.
• Security: Pages web can not only be password protected, but you can also add time limits that ensure your proposals can’t be viewed after a certain date, as well as view limits, so they can only be viewed a certain number of times.You can even require potential customers to sign in with their work email address before viewing the page to ensure only the right people see it.
• Interactivity: Web pages can have interactive content like video, audio, maps, forms, spreadsheets, InVision prototypes, and more embedded into them. You can even add things like pricing calculators that let potential customers see what the price would look like when they add that extra upsell.
• Traceability: Every interaction your leads have with a web page tracker so you can see when they view your proposal, for how long, what content they view, where they view it from, and more.
• Accessibility : Because web pages use clear HTML markup, accessibility tools like screen readers can figure out what content is on the page, which means the 50 million Americans with a disability won’t have a problem accessing it to your proposals and documents (and you won’t fall for it). an Office for Civil Rights violation).
• Editable: Unlike a PDF, web pages can be edited at any time, even after they’ve been sent to the prospect . So if you discover you’ve made a typo, you can quickly go in and change it before anyone else knows.

Tools like Qwilr make it easy to create your proposals and other sales documents and marketing. like web pages. Use the WYSIWYG interface to add text, photos, videos, mockups and more to your proposal, and when you’re done, simply email your prospect with a link instead of attaching a PDF.

Get Started with a template

Just like UI kits and CMS themes give you a head start on designing and building sites, there are great website design proposal templates out there, such as this one from Qwilr, which can give you a head start in creating a great proposal.

They come with pre-written content like the sections mentioned above, beautiful images, pricing tables, and more, and can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes you to create and submit proposals.

(See the proposal template here.)

Recycle Your Best Content

You’ll probably write a lot of design proposals of websites over the course of your career, and it makes no sense to start Start from scratch each time.

So I recommend doing one or more of the following:

• Save proposals you like in a specific place: If you’ve created a proposal that you think is particularly good, save it to a specific place instead of leaving it deep in your disorganized Google Drive or Dropbox. That way, when you need to create another proposal, you can easily return to it, make a few edits, and submit it.
• Keep sections that you don’t change much: There are certain sections of proposals that design of websites that do not change much from one proposal to another. Things like ‘About Us’ and ‘Our Team’ are great examples, and even the ‘Costs’ section can often be quite similar if you’re doing similar types of projects over and over again. So, create a small slider file (even if it’s just a Google or Word document) into which you put some of this reusable content, and then you can easily copy and paste it into new proposals in the future.

Nail the proposal

Writing winning web design proposals can be a waste of time and resources, no question about it. But by starting to think of your pitches like an end user and optimizing the actual user experience of your sales prospecting, you can transform your efforts into a strong sales pipeline.

With a little time and ingenuity, revamping your web design proposals can drastically improve your close rate. Refresh your documents today with the sections we discussed above and start closing deals! To get you started, here is a link to a free website design proposal template.

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