What should a website quote include?

A quote should name a fixed price against a written scope, list the deliverables, state who owns the hosting, domain and code, define what counts as a post-launch fix and for how long, and say what is explicitly excluded. Anything vaguer becomes a negotiation in week two.

Why do website quotes vary so much?

Two reasons stacked together. Location and overhead account for most of the spread, because the same work costs different amounts depending on where the developer lives and how many salaries sit between you and them. The rest is that the quotes are often not for the same site at all.

How long does a website take to build?

A small business website takes about three days of build time once scope is agreed and content exists. An e-commerce store takes about a week, a custom application about ten days. What stretches those timelines is almost never the code — it is decisions and missing content.

Hiring

How do I write a website brief?

Answer four things: what the site must do, who produces the content, what it must integrate with, and when it has to launch. Every scope dispute I have seen traces back to one of those being left implicit, and a clear brief also makes quotes comparable.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 199 words 3 sections

The ten sections

What the business does and who buys from it
The current situation — existing site, platform, what works and what does not
The primary goal, in one sentence
Must-have functionality
Nice-to-have functionality, listed separately so it can be cut
Content: who writes it, who supplies photography, by when
Integrations — payment, accounting, CRM, dispatch
Design direction: two or three references and specifically what you like
Timeline and any fixed date, with the reason
Budget range

State the budget

Hiding it so a supplier does not "take all of it" is understandable and costs you money. Without a range they must guess which of several very different projects you want, and the guess is usually wrong in whichever direction suits you least.

Send the same brief to everyone

Identically. It is the only way the quotes are comparable, and a supplier who resists a competitive process has told you something useful.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Writing a website brief that gets you comparable quotes covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.