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Website procurements are reliably stressful and frequently go wrong. Not usually because the agency was bad (though that happens), but because the organisation didn’t know clearly what it wanted, didn’t evaluate proposals consistently, and ended up making a decision based on gut feeling or the most impressive-looking presentation on the day.
A structured scoring process doesn’t guarantee you’ll pick the right agency. But it means your decision can be explained and defended, it reduces the influence of whoever in the room happens to be most persuasive, and it makes it easier to compare proposals that are trying very hard to be incomparable.
Before you write the brief
The quality of proposals you receive is directly related to the quality of the brief you send out. A vague brief produces vague proposals that are impossible to compare. Before you approach any agencies, you need clear answers to a few questions: What’s wrong with the current site? What does success look like in two years? Who are the primary audiences, and what do you know about how they use the site now? What are the technical constraints, existing CMS, integration requirements, hosting arrangements?
If you can’t answer those questions clearly, you’re not ready to go to market yet. An agency cannot solve a problem you haven’t defined.
What to score, and how to weight it
The criteria you score proposals against should reflect what actually matters for your project, not a generic list. For most website procurements, the areas worth evaluating include: technical approach, design capability and portfolio, understanding of your organisation and audiences, CMS and content management approach, accessibility, project management methodology, relevant experience, and cost.
Weighting matters more than the scores themselves. If your organisation has a very specific technical integration requirement, that criterion should carry more weight than design aesthetics. If you’re commissioning a site that needs to work for people with low digital confidence, accessibility should be weighted heavily. Set the weights before you read the proposals, not after, it’s too easy to weight things in retrospect to justify a decision you’ve already made.
Scoring as a group
Scoring proposals in a group and comparing scores is more useful than one person scoring everything. The differences in scores tend to surface the important disagreements: you might score the technical approach a 4 and your IT colleague scores it a 2, and the conversation about why is more valuable than the average score.
Brief the scoring panel on what each criterion means and what evidence they should look for in the proposals before they start reading. Without that briefing, everyone will interpret the criteria slightly differently and the scores won’t be comparable.
A template to work from
The website procurement scoring spreadsheet has weighted scoring criteria across technical approach, design, accessibility, CMS, project management, experience, and cost. Edit the weights to reflect your project’s priorities before you start scoring. Comes as an editable Excel file and a PDF reference version.
Website Tender Scoring Template
Editable Excel spreadsheet with weighted scoring criteria and a PDF reference version.