It is twenty to midnight and you are reading the quote for the second time. The first time you looked only at the last page, the one with the number on it. Now you are reading the second page, the one that says what the number buys, and every third word is one you would have asked about in the meeting. There is nobody to ask now.
Some of these words are already written down: domain, DNS, certificate, the ones somebody says across a table. Here is the second batch: the words you meet on your own. A quote late at night, a designer sharing their screen, and the letter that arrives once a year about your domain. Every abbreviation is spelled out in brackets.
Four words, and only one of them gets argued about
The second page of a quote almost always opens with a word that sounds like a measurement.
- Scope - the list of what is inside the price, and a second list of what is not. The second half usually goes unwritten.
- Wireframe and prototype - a wireframe is a drawing of the page in grey boxes; a prototype is the same drawing with things you can click. Neither is a design yet.
- Design and build - the design is a picture of what the site will look like; the build turns that picture into a site that works. If they are two lines, the first one buys you a picture, not a website.
- Responsive - the page fits itself to the width of a phone. That is all it says: the page fits on a phone. Whether it works there is a separate question.
Of those four, the first is the only one anybody argues about later. Stages come and go; the scope is the promise that stays. When it is a list, both sides are reading the same line in month three.
A quote holds two dates and prints one
The second half is about time.
- Staging - a copy of the site at a hidden address, where changes are tried out before anybody sees them.
- Go-live - the moment your domain starts showing the new site. That date is in the quote.
- Acceptance - the moment you say the work is done. From then on, every new wish is a change request and every fault is a warranty matter. That date is usually not in the quote.
- Change request - something that was not in the agreed scope, and therefore carries its own price. A change request is not the bad part; finding out about it on the invoice is.
- Warranty - a promise to fix what was promised and does not work. It does not cover a new wish. Ask how long it runs and what counts as a fault.
- Retainer - a monthly fee covering updates, backups and an agreed number of small changes. We sell one ourselves and still say: read how many changes a month actually includes.
- "Content from the client" - the words and photos are yours to supply, and the clock starts on the day they arrive. Why a site stalls on exactly that line is a story of its own.
Go-live is the date you wait for. Acceptance is the date the money changes direction: before it, things get fixed, after it, they get invoiced. The second date matters more than the first, and it is the one that is missing more often.
The designer talks about the draft as if it were a house
In week three the designer shares their screen. They scroll through the draft and describe it like a building: here is the door, here are the stairs, this is where a person comes in.
- Hero, or the first screen - what a visitor sees before scrolling: a heading, one sentence, one button. "Above the fold" is the same place in newspaper language: the half you can see while the paper is folded.
- CTA (call to action) - the button or line that says what the visitor should do next: call, book. A page with five of them has none.
- Slug, or the address line - the last part of an address, for example
/services/roofing. Before go-live, changing it costs one click; after go-live, the old address needs a redirect to the new one, or an old link lands nowhere. - Alt text - the sentence attached to a photo that a screen reader reads out and a machine sees. It is written from what the photo means.
- Preview card (OG image, Open Graph) - the picture and heading that appear when somebody pastes your link into a chat. Leave it unset and the machine picks its own, rarely the right one.
These get talked about beside the draft, but they are decided before it. Three sentences from you - who is coming, what they are looking for, what they should do - are worth more to a draft than ten comments about colour.
The letter that arrives once a year from a company you do not remember
The letter is headed "Your domain is expiring". The words in it have a familiar shape but not a familiar meaning.
- Registrar and registry - the registry is Eesti Interneti SA, which keeps the list of .ee names; the registrar is the company you rent the name through and the one that sends the invoice. The letter comes from the second, the name sits with the first.
- WHOIS - the public record of whose name a domain is in. Whose name it ought to be is a separate article.
- Transfer code (authorisation code) - the password needed to move a domain to another registrar. Your current registrar issues it: what changes is who sends the invoice, not the name and not the site.
- Subdomain - a word put in front of your name:
shop.yourcompany.ee. Evenwwwis one of these, and somebody has to decide which form is the real address. - MX record (Mail Exchange) - a line in your domain settings saying which server takes your mail, which is how a site can live in one building and the post in another. The three settings that decide whether a message lands in the inbox or in spam sit right beside it.
- Expiry and renewal - the renewal notice goes to the address given at registration; on the expiry date the name does not vanish, it first goes dark, and the mail goes with it. Check whether that address still belongs to anybody.
The most important thing in that letter is what it does not say: the sender is not the party holding your name. They are a middleman, and a middleman can be changed without the name or the site moving anywhere. The only thing here you must never let expire is the name.
A year later a second quote arrives
A year after go-live somebody says: let us put booking on the site too. A second quote arrives, shorter than the first, and it carries words the first one did not.
- Integration - two systems start talking to each other: the form sends an enquiry into your customer database, the shop into your accounts. An API (Application Programming Interface) is the door that runs through. If the other system has no door, there is no integration either.
- Embed (iframe) and widget - somebody else's piece inside your page: a map, a video, a booking calendar, a chat window. If that service changes its price or disappears, the window changes with it.
- Tracking pixel - a snippet from Facebook or Google that tells them somebody visited your site. It is why your page has a cookie bar, and it must not run before consent.
- Uptime - the share of time the site was reachable. The promise about it is an SLA (Service Level Agreement), and what that figure actually promises you is set out in the outage article.
The pattern is a single one: nearly every bolted-on thing is somebody else's code inside your site, and it often costs a monthly fee that is not on your supplier's invoice. Each time, ask whose it is and what happens if that side disappears.
The most expensive word in a quote is "etc."
Now back to twenty to midnight. None of the words above is the place where a quote turns expensive.
It is the line that ends in "etc." - "Home page, service pages, contact page, etc." You read a blog and a gallery into that word; your supplier reads the contact page into it. Neither of you is lying. That word is the one place in the quote whose price neither side knows, and therefore the one thing that comes back to the table in month three.
The second most expensive is "content from the client". Not because the line is dishonest; it is honest. Because it is the only line whose deadline your supplier does not control, and the very line a project stalls behind.
Three things to do with the quote this week
The quote is on the table. Do three things with it.
- Ask for a list in place of every "etc." That is one email, and for the supplier it is mostly a relief: they do not want to argue in month three about what a word meant either.
- Read every line so that it says what you get, not what the supplier does. "We will produce the design" does not say how many pages, how many rounds, or in what file. If a line will not translate, ask.
- Find the two dates. Go-live and acceptance. If the second is missing, ask for it, along with what triggers it.
The honest part: we write quotes ourselves, and these three are exactly what we would want a client to ask us. A list in place of "etc." protects both sides equally. And if a supplier answers that it cannot be pinned down that precisely, that answer is itself the reason the question was worth asking.
Frequently asked questions
Go-live is the moment your domain begins showing the new site, and that date is nearly always printed in the quote. Acceptance is the moment you confirm the work is finished, and that one usually is not. It is the more important of the two, because after it the relationship changes: faults are repaired under warranty, while anything new is priced as a change request. Ask for the acceptance date to be written in, along with what sets it off: your confirmation, a fixed period of silence, or go-live itself.
A change request is a wish that was not in the agreed scope, so it carries a price of its own. There is nothing wrong with that; the wrong part is learning of it from an invoice. A warranty is normally a promise to repair what was promised and does not work, and it does not stretch to cover a new wish. Two questions are worth putting before you sign: how long does it run, and what counts as a fault. Both answers are short when the supplier has thought about them.
The registry keeps the list. For .ee names that is Eesti Interneti SA, and your company sits in that list as the holder. The registrar is the middleman you rent through, and the party that sends the yearly letter saying your domain is about to expire. The letter therefore comes from the middleman while the name sits in the registry. Two things follow from that. You can change registrar without the name or the website moving anywhere, and the yearly letter is a rent renewal rather than a bill for a service.
The transfer code, also called an authorisation code, is the password a new registrar asks for in order to take the domain over, and your current registrar is the one that issues it. What the move changes is who invoices you and where you manage the domain settings. The name stays the same, the holder stays the same, and the website does not go anywhere. The rest of it is paperwork, and the new registrar does that part.
Because it is the one word in the document whose price neither side knows. A line reading "home page, service pages, contact page, etc." is read by the client as covering a blog and a gallery, and by the supplier as covering the contact page. Neither of them is lying, and that is the word that comes back to the table in month three. The remedy is one email: ask for a list in place of every "etc.", and read each line so that it says what you receive rather than what the supplier does.
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