Most agencies quote off a brief. The brief describes what the client thinks the problem is, which is a reasonable starting point and a terrible basis for a fixed price.
The brief is a symptom
People come to us asking for a faster site, a fresher look, or a new CMS. Those are all real things. They are also, nearly every time, the visible edge of something else — a checkout with too many steps, a homepage that never says what the company does, an analytics setup that has been miscounting conversions for two years.
If you quote the brief, you build the brief. Then everyone is surprised when the number at the end of the quarter has not moved.
What nine days buys
- Performance measured on a real phone on a real connection, not a lab score
- The paths people actually take through the site, from the analytics you already have
- Where they leave, and whether that is a design, content or code problem
- An accessibility pass against WCAG AA
- A written, prioritised list of what to fix and what to leave alone
The uncomfortable part
About a third of our audits end with us saying you do not need a new website. That is a fixed fee we have collected and a much larger project we have talked ourselves out of.
We keep doing it because the alternative is building something expensive that we already suspect will not work, which is a bad way to spend six weeks and a worse way to earn a referral.
What happens next
The audit becomes the scope. Every line in the proposal traces back to something measured, which means the conversation stops being about taste and starts being about sequence — what gets fixed first, what can wait a quarter, what should never be built at all.
About a third of our audits end with us saying you do not need a new website.