On the verge of burnout of looking over some exhausting RFPs for website projects, I always look back to the post from Seth Godin’s blog (September 19, 2009). I wish more people responsible for issuing website RFPs would read this list before having their corporate purchasing zombie nail together pages upon pages of meaningless boilerplate. Seriously, a recent RFP came through for a $50,000 maximum budget, and asked for our shop’s financial statements for the last fiscal year. It might surprise them to know that we wipe our asses with $50,000 bills. Not really, but the level of detail of this aforementioned RFP, only 1 paragraph on 1 page (out of 36 pages) really describes or hints at what they want. Then the word “state-of-the-art” creeps in, and that begs the question, what does state-of-the-art mean? That term reminds me of Electrolux vacuum cleaners, not websites. Our of Godin’s list, the first question is the most all-important. If you don’t have this figured out, why write the rest of the RFP?
- What is the goal of the site?