What to put in a website RFP (and what to leave out)

We read a lot of website RFPs from park districts, municipalities and other public bodies. Most of them make it impossible to compare the bids they attract, and the tell is always the same: the responses come back an order of magnitude apart, and the evaluation committee has no principled way to choose.

That is almost always a specification problem rather than a vendor problem.

What to leave out

A page count

"Approximately 40 pages" invites bids priced by the page, which rewards whoever plans to do the least on each one. Page count also has close to no relationship with effort. Forty pages of text is a fortnight. One registration flow that talks to your recreation system is longer than that on its own.

A prescribed technology stack

Unless you have staff who will maintain it, naming the CMS narrows your field to whoever already sells it and removes your ability to compare approaches. Specify what you need to be true, that staff can edit content without a developer, that it is hosted and patched, that you can export your content. Let the vendors argue for how.

Design direction

"Modern, clean, engaging" appears in nearly every RFP and eliminates nobody. If you have real constraints, brand colors, an accessibility palette, an existing logo, attach them. Otherwise ask to see relevant work and judge that instead.

What to specify, precisely

What a visitor must be able to do

This is the part that determines the price, and it is usually the vaguest section. Write it as tasks:

• A resident registers a child for a program and pays, without calling.
• A resident finds today's pool hours from a phone in under fifteen seconds.
• Staff post a facility closure in under five minutes, without a support ticket.
• A contractor downloads the current bid packet and its addenda.

Vendors can price that. They cannot price "modern and engaging".

Integrations, by name and version

If registration lives in RecTrac, WebTrac, ActiveNet or CivicRec, say so, say which version, and say whether API access is already licensed. This is the single largest variable in the price, and leaving it vague is the main reason bids come back so far apart. Half the bidders are assuming a link out to the vendor's portal and half are assuming a real integration.

The accessibility standard, with the deadline

Name WCAG 2.1 Level AA explicitly, and state that it covers PDFs, online forms and any third-party tools you embed. As of August 2026 the DOJ's ADA Title II rule sets compliance dates of April 26, 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. Those dates were extended once already, so check the current rule at ada.gov and have your attorney confirm which category you are in before you build a procurement timeline on it.

Ask how the vendor tests it and who does the testing. Ask what happens to your existing PDF library, which is where most districts discover the real cost.

Who owns the content and the site

State that all content, designs and custom code become district property, and that you receive an export in a standard format on request. Ask what happens if you leave in year two.

How to structure the pricing

Ask for it in three parts, and say you will evaluate them separately:

• The build, as a project figure you can bid against a capital budget.
• An annual care plan, covering hosting, patching, backups, accessibility monitoring and support, quoted per year so it can be renewed.
• An hourly or daily rate for work beyond the approved scope, which most procurement rules require anyway.

Splitting it this way solves a real problem. Public bodies bid websites as capital projects, and many cannot award an all-in subscription at all. It also stops a vendor hiding ongoing cost inside a low build number, which is the most common way a cheap bid becomes expensive.

Ask for third-party costs, hosting, CMS licenses, search, to be listed separately and passed through at cost. Any of those marked up is worth knowing about before you award, not after.

Two questions worth adding

• "Describe a project where you integrated with our registration system, and give us a reference." Not "do you have experience with". Make them name it.
• "Who specifically will do the work?" Agencies bid with their senior people and staff with juniors. Asking for named individuals and their involvement makes that harder to do quietly.

We price this way as standard, a build plus a care plan, because it is the shape procurement actually needs. If you're writing one of these and want a second pair of eyes on the scope before it goes out, that conversation is free and does not oblige you to invite us to bid. More detail on how we approach this sits on our page for park districts.