What goes in a web design proposal

Nine parts, five to seven pages, and one of the nine is a section that almost no competing document contains. That section is why a proposal wins against a quote half its price, and it takes about twenty minutes to write once you own the values.

The verdict: the proposal is where the design decisions become contractual. Everything else in the document protects you, and that one section sells. Get both right and the follow-up call is an order form rather than a negotiation.

What follows assumes a project between $5,000 and $20,000 for a business with revenue. Below that, a one-page confirmation is the correct document and a proposal is theater; for a local shop, how to sell websites to local businesses covers that smaller sale from the first call to the handover.

Their sentence first, not your introduction#

Open with their problem, in their words, from the call. Not a company history, not a paragraph about your process, not a stock line about digital presence. One short paragraph that proves you listened, and it should be quotable back at you.

"You are turning away implant cases to a competitor whose site loads slowly and looks better, and your before-and-after photographs, which are the best asset you have, are cropped square in a slider nobody scrolls." A client who reads their own situation described more precisely than they described it has already decided about you before reaching a price.

Then one sentence naming the outcome in their measure, not yours:

• Not "a modern, conversion-focused website" but "consultation bookings from the site, tracked, with the surgical cases separated from the routine ones".
• Not "improved brand perception" but "a site that holds up against the two practices you lose cases to, which are named on page four".
• Not "SEO improvements" but "the two service pages you currently rank second for".

Write that paragraph from your notes on the call, not from memory a week later. The specific phrases matter, and clients notice their own phrases coming back at them. If you cannot write it because the call did not produce it, the honest move is another twenty minutes on the phone rather than a paragraph of filler about digital presence.

Scope written as artifacts#

A scope line that describes volume invites a comparison on volume. Replace every one with a named artifact and a count, and the document stops being comparable to a template marketplace.

Each of these designs is written as counted values, down to where their contrast and colors were measured:

The right column takes longer to write once and then never again. A client cannot negotiate a line they can count, which is the entire mechanism: "five templates at three widths" has an obvious answer when they ask for a sixth, and "five pages" has an argument.

Put the counts in a table exactly as above. A proposal that can be read in columns gets read, and a proposal written as nine paragraphs of prose gets skimmed to the number at the bottom.

The design commitments nobody includes#

This is the section that wins. One page, written as values, stating what the design will be before it exists. Competitors are writing "clean, modern and intuitive", which is unfalsifiable and therefore worthless as a promise.

Paste a version of this, with your own values in it:

Type runs a modular scale at 1.25 from a 16px base, so 16 / 20 / 25 / 31 / 39 / 49 / 61 and no size between them. Headings set at 1.05 leading with -0.02em tracking above 31px. Spacing follows an 8px ramp, 8 / 16 / 24 / 40 / 64 / 104 / 168, with section padding at clamp(96px, 12vw, 176px). Motion uses two curves only: cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1) at 560ms for entrances, staggered 70ms, and cubic-bezier(0.33, 1, 0.68, 1) at 160ms for interface response, with a prefers-reduced-motion branch at 1ms. Palette is five roles: #12100E ink, #FAF7F2 paper, #6E6459 muted at 5.4:1, #B3421C accent at 5.3:1, #ECE5DA field.

Clients do not read every value and that is fine. They read that the values exist, and a document containing them next to a document containing adjectives settles the decision without you saying a word about price. Writing those values from nothing is the hard part, and it is what Thanor supplies per design in exactly this form.

Money, revisions and the dates that bind#

Three priced options, anchored high, with the middle one described in the terms above. The cheapest option exists to show honestly what accepting framework defaults means, which makes the middle one read as sensible rather than expensive. The four band model behind those numbers is here.

The clauses that save the project, all of them short:

• Payment 40 / 40 / 20, on signature, on design approval, on launch. Never a single invoice at the end.
• An expiry on the price, fourteen days, stated once without explanation.
• Content deadline as a dated dependency, with the launch date moving by the same number of days the content is late. This clause turns the most common delay into arithmetic instead of an argument.
• A revision round defined: one consolidated written list, returned within five working days, two rounds included, further rounds at a stated day rate.
• Exclusions by name: copywriting, photography, logo work, third-party licenses, ongoing hosting, anything on a domain you do not control.
• A kill fee at 40% of the remaining balance if the project is canceled after design approval.
• License and ownership transferring on final payment, and the handover contents listed so the client knows what arrives. Fonts, images and design prompts each carry their own license, and step 6 of starting a web design business with AI covers each one.
• References used for ideas and values only, when the client hands you a site to copy: its layout idea and style values can be taken, and its text, images, logos and code cannot.

Then a signature block on the last page, with a date field, and nothing after it. A document that ends with the signature asks for one action and nothing else.

The verdict on the document#

Nine parts, and the one that decides the outcome is the design commitments page. Their sentence opens it, artifacts replace volume, values replace adjectives, three options replace one number, and the clauses at the back keep the last third of the project from becoming unpaid.

Send it as a PDF attached to a short email rather than as a link behind a login that reports when they opened it. The document has to be forwardable to a partner, a practice manager or a spouse without an account, because in these niches the person who signs is almost never the only person who reads.

Three checks before you send it:

• Every scope line names an artifact and a count, not a volume.
• The commitments page contains at least one value with a unit attached.
• The last thing on the last page is the signature block.

Write the commitments page once, keep it as your own reusable document, and change only the values per project. Where the values come from is the whole question, and what actually separates a $500 file from a $15,000 one answers it value by value. Before the proposal, the case page that gets you into the room does the work.

Open Judgy and read how its direction states contrast, color and motion as values with units, then write your commitments page to the same standard. A free account opens the designs marked free, such as Vesperion, and the plans open the rest of the library.