Before You Brief a Web Agency: Sitemap, Content and Scope to Prepare

Many website projects that go wrong do so before a single page is designed. Three agencies receive a one-paragraph email (“we need a new corporate website, Arabic and English, modern”), each fills the gaps with its own assumptions, and the company ends up comparing a twelve-page brochure site against a forty-page bilingual build with integrations. Once a supplier is chosen, the project then waits weeks for texts, photos and approvals that nobody inside the company was assigned to produce.

A short preparation pack fixes both problems. It is not a 30-page procurement document. It is five sections that tell every agency the same thing, so their proposals describe the same project, and that tell your own team what it owes the project before kick-off. Below is what each section should contain, written for companies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Qatar that sell to other businesses.

A copyable website RFP template

Copy the outline below into a document, fill in the blanks, and send the same version to every agency.

1. Goals, audiences and results. Business jobs the site must do: 1. ___ 2. ___ 3. ___. Audiences in priority order, with the question each arrives with and the action we want: ___. Conversions to track: form / WhatsApp / call / download / other: ___. Markets and languages: ___ (primary language: ___). Constraints and fixed dates: ___. Budget: range ___ / no range; please price a core scope plus options.
2. Draft sitemap. A table with the columns: page or template, quantity, languages, who supplies content, notes. Mark each row fixed or open to challenge. Rows: home (1); about (__); service pages (__); product or brand pages (__ from one template); projects (__); insights (template + __ posts); careers, contact, downloads, legal pages (__).
3. Content inventory. A spreadsheet with the columns: item, exists today (yes / partly / no), where it lives, language now and language needed, owner inside our company, action (reuse / rewrite / translate / adapt / photograph / retire). Writing responsibility: agency writes / agency edits / we supply. Arabic approach: translation / adaptation / original writing for pages ___. Single approver: ___; backup: ___.
4. Integrations, tracking, data and accessibility. Lead routing: ___. Analytics: GA4 and Search Console, conversions above set up before launch. Ad platform tags: ___. Other systems (CRM, ERP, careers, newsletter): integration / link. Personal data: privacy notice, consent wording on forms, record of where form data is stored. Accessibility target: ___ (e.g. WCAG 2.2 Level AA for templates and key pages). Pages our team must be able to edit: ___; training included.
5. Migration and ownership. Current site: ___ URLs; the agency builds and tests a URL map with direct 301 redirects, kept for at least one year. Ownership clause: “The domain, DNS, hosting account, Google Analytics 4 property, Search Console property, design source files, code, licences and all content are registered to or administered by [company name]; the agency is granted access and hands over all files at the end of the project.”

End the document with the response format in the last section of this article, and ask every agency to answer in that order.

Section 1: Goals, audiences and what counts as a result

Agencies design for the goal you give them. If the brief says “modern”, you get a visual exercise. If it says “procurement teams must be able to confirm our registrations and download our profile in under a minute”, you get a different site.

Write one page covering:

• The two or three business jobs the site must do. For example: generate quotation requests for a named product line, support vendor registration and pre-qualification, recruit engineers, or give a newly appointed distributor credibility in a new market.
• Who visits and what they check. List the audiences in priority order (procurement officers, consultants, end clients, dealers, job applicants) and, for each, the question they arrive with and the action you want them to take.
• What counts as a conversion. A form submission, a WhatsApp click, a call, a catalogue download. Name them now; they become tracking requirements later.
• Markets and languages. Which countries you sell into and which languages each audience reads. A Saudi government-facing buyer and a Dubai-based consultant may need different things from the same site.
• How the audiences change the structure. A brief that names more than one audience changes the site: the Elomdaa website RX built is Arabic-first, with a product catalogue for nuts, coffee, spices and grains, a separate wholesale-supply path for businesses, and WhatsApp on every page.
• Constraints. A fixed launch event, an exhibition, a rebrand that must go live at the same time, or a parent-company or partner brand guideline the site must follow.

Section 2: A draft sitemap agencies can price against

You do not need a finished information architecture; that is part of what you are hiring for. You do need a draft that fixes the number and type of pages, because page count and page type drive design, writing and build effort more than anything else. Mark which items are fixed and which agencies may challenge.

Two distinctions matter when proposals come back. First, unique pages versus templated pages: forty product pages built from one template usually cost far less to design than forty individually designed pages, but someone still has to load forty sets of data. Ask each agency who does that loading. Second, launch scope versus phase two: it is often better to launch the Arabic version of your ten most important pages, written properly, than a machine-translated copy of everything.

If you are bilingual, say how. Google’s guidance on localized versions assumes each language version has its own URL, and that “each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions” in hreflang annotations, and that if two pages do not both point to each other, the tags are ignored. You do not need to specify the implementation, but you should require separate, crawlable URLs per language and ask how the agency will handle right-to-left layouts. Our guide to Arabic and English website structure covers the decisions in detail.

Section 3: The content inventory, and who owes what

Content is where schedules most often slip, because it depends on people outside the marketing team: engineers who must review a technical claim, a general manager who must approve the company story, a quality department that holds the certificates. A content inventory turns those dependencies into a list with names on it.

Build a simple spreadsheet with one row per content item and these columns:

1. Item (e.g. “ISO certificate scan”, “Fire pump range data sheet”, “CEO message”, “Riyadh warehouse photos”).
2. Exists today? Yes, partly, or no.
3. Where it lives (current site, company profile, shared drive, a partner’s portal).
4. Language it exists in, and language(s) it is needed in.
5. Owner inside your company who supplies or approves it.
6. Action: reuse as is, rewrite, translate, adapt, photograph, or retire.

Then decide three things explicitly, and put them in the brief:

• Writing responsibility. Does the agency write the copy, edit your drafts, or only place supplied text? These are very different scopes and are often priced as if they were the same.
• Arabic approach. Translation from English, adaptation, or original Arabic writing for priority pages. Arabic copy for buyers who search in Arabic is a writing job, not a conversion step.
• Visual assets. Whether you have usable photography of your sites, products and team, or whether photography and video need to be included or quoted separately.

Also name a single approver with authority to sign off pages, plus a backup. Projects often stall less on disagreement than on nobody being able to say “approved”.

Section 4: Integrations, tracking, data and accessibility

These items are invisible in design presentations and expensive to add after launch. List what you need and let agencies confirm how they will deliver it.

• Lead handling. Where form submissions go (shared inbox, CRM, sales team by product line), whether WhatsApp or click-to-call buttons are required, and whether different forms route to different people.
• Analytics and conversion tracking. Require that the site is connected to Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, with the conversions from Section 1 set up as tracked events before launch, not after. If you run ads, list the platforms whose tags must be installed.
• Other systems. CRM, ERP or product databases, careers platforms, newsletter tools, maps, booking tools. For each, say whether you expect a real integration or a link.
• Personal data. Contact and careers forms collect personal data. Saudi Arabia has a Personal Data Protection Law, overseen by SDAIA, and the UAE has Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 regarding the protection of personal data; other markets you collect leads from may have their own rules. The agency is not your legal adviser, but the brief should require a privacy notice page, cookie consent handling, clear consent wording on forms and a record of where form data is stored, with the wording itself reviewed by whoever advises you on compliance.
• Accessibility. If accessibility matters to your buyers or your own policy, name a target. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, a W3C Recommendation since October 2023, define three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA, and the W3C notes that choosing a target level is a policy decision. Stating “WCAG 2.2 Level AA for templates and key pages” is far easier to price and test than “accessible”.
• Platform and management. If you want your team to edit pages themselves, say which content they must be able to change (news, jobs, products) and ask for training to be included.

Section 5: Migration and ownership requirements

If you are replacing an existing site, this section protects the search visibility you already have. Google’s guidance on site moves with URL changes is specific, and your brief can turn it into requirements:

1. A URL map. A list of current URLs, starting from sitemaps, high-traffic pages and server logs, each mapped to its new destination. Google’s guidance includes images, videos and CSS and JavaScript files in that inventory.
2. Server-side permanent (301) redirects from each old URL directly to its new equivalent, without chains. Google warns against sending many old URLs to an unrelated page such as the new homepage, which can be treated as a soft 404.
3. Updated canonical tags, hreflang annotations and internal links pointing to the new URLs.
4. A new XML sitemap submitted in Search Console, and, if the domain itself changes, a Change of Address request in Search Console for the old site.
5. Redirects kept in place for “generally at least 1 year”, which Google recommends, and ideally longer. That means the old domain must stay registered and the redirect configuration must survive any hosting change.

Ask agencies to say who builds the URL map, who tests redirects before and after launch, and how long they monitor the move. Google notes that for medium-sized sites it “can take a few weeks or more” for new URLs to replace old ones in search, so some fluctuation in rankings and traffic during that period is expected; a drop that lasts is often a sign of missing or incorrect redirects.

Ownership needs the same precision. Write into the brief that the following are registered to, or administered by, your company, with the agency given access rather than the other way round:

• The domain name and DNS account.
• The hosting account, or a clear contract if the agency hosts on your behalf, including how you get a full backup if you leave.
• The Google Analytics 4 property, with a company account holding the Administrator role.
• Google Search Console, with your company as a verified owner. Google’s Search Console permissions help page explains that if all verified owners are removed, the remaining users and delegated owners lose access after a grace period, so this should never rest on one freelancer’s account.
• Design source files, theme or code, licences for paid plugins, fonts and stock images, and the content itself, handed over at the end of the project.

What to ask agencies to send back

End your brief with this response format, so replies come back in a comparable shape:

Once proposals are in this format, comparing them becomes a review of differences rather than a guess, and choosing between the agencies that reply becomes a question of fit and evidence. Our article on the line items behind a website quote explains how those differences usually affect price.

At RX Designer, a website project covers structure and copy as well as design and build, and the client receives the final and source files at handover. You can see live examples in our websites portfolio.

Send the same five sections to every agency and score the replies against the response table. If you want a second pair of eyes before it goes out, bring your draft sitemap and content inventory to a business diagnosis session; we will mark what is missing and where agencies are likely to price differently.