Hiring a web developer in Birmingham: how to scope it, brief it and read the proposals

If you run a business in Birmingham and you are about to spend real money on a website, the hardest part is not choosing a designer. It is working out what you are buying, writing it down clearly enough that three firms can quote on the same thing, then reading their answers with a sceptical eye.

Decide what the site is for before you decide what it looks like

Birmingham's economy is not one thing. Professional and financial services around Colmore Row and Brindleyplace sell on credibility and people. Engineering suppliers out towards Aston and Tyseley sell on capability, certifications and lead times. The Jewellery Quarter sells physical goods, where a hallmark and a returns policy matter more than a hero animation. A firm chasing NEC traffic needs a site that turns a badge scan into a meeting.

Those are four different builds. Write one sentence describing the single decision your site has to win, and the scope follows from it. "Convince a procurement lead at a tier one automotive supplier that we hold tolerance and pass audit" produces a very different page set from "get a homeowner in Moseley to book a survey".

Scope for how people here actually use the web

Some of this is universal. Some is specific enough that a firm which has never sold into the UK will get it wrong.

• Postcode lookup, not a free-text address box. UK visitors expect to type a postcode, pick their address from a list and move on. Making someone type a Kings Heath address line by line on a phone costs you completed forms. Budget for an address lookup service.
• Service areas described the way locals think. People search by neighbourhood and postcode district, not by council ward. Harborne, Digbeth, Sutton Coldfield, Solihull, B15, B18. If you cover part of the West Midlands and not all of it, say so plainly instead of claiming vague national coverage.
• The Clean Air Zone question, if you send vehicles out. Any trade quoting jobs inside the city centre gets asked about charges eventually. A short, honest page answering it beats another testimonial slider.
• Language. More than a hundred languages are spoken in the city, with Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Pahari, Polish, Somali and Arabic all having real speaker populations. That does not automatically mean a translated site. It may mean naming which languages your team can serve customers in, and rendering names and right-to-left text properly rather than mangling them.
• Mobile on a patchy signal. Plenty of visitors land on a phone, on 4G, somewhere between New Street and Snow Hill. A heavy hero video is a real cost there, not a theoretical one.

Put the UK compliance work in the brief, not in the change request

Most arguments about website budgets are really arguments about work that was assumed rather than specified. Name these items and you get comparable quotes.

Cookies and tracking

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations govern cookies and similar storage. Changes from the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 took effect in February 2026 and cut two ways: a narrow set of low risk uses such as first party analytics no longer needs a consent box, while the maximum penalty for getting consent wrong rose to UK GDPR levels. Ask which consent tool the firm will use, whether tags genuinely stay blocked until consent, and who keeps that configuration correct after launch.

Accessibility

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments, and there is no exemption for small firms. In practice that means building to WCAG 2.2 AA. If you sell to public bodies, which in this city plausibly means the council, an NHS trust or one of the four universities, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 will surface in their procurement questions and you will need answers about your own product. Sell to consumers in Ireland or the EU and the European Accessibility Act applies to those services, even though the UK did not adopt it.

How you present prices and reviews

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gave the Competition and Markets Authority direct powers over unfair practices, including drip pricing and fake or incentivised reviews. If your site shows prices, mandatory fees belong in the headline figure. If it shows reviews, you need to know where they came from. That is a content decision, so it belongs in the scope rather than in a legal review the week before launch.

The boring statutory details

Under the Companies Act 2006 trading disclosure rules, a limited company must show its registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office address on its website. Sell online to consumers and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 govern cancellation rights and what you must say before checkout. Process personal data and you almost certainly owe the ICO an annual data protection fee. None of it is expensive. All of it is embarrassing to discover late.

What a useful brief contains

1. 01The problem in business terms. "Enquiries are mostly the wrong size of job" is more useful than "we need a redesign".
2. 02Who you need to convince, described as a person with a job title and a reason to doubt you.
3. 03What already exists: brand assets, photography, written copy, a CRM you cannot move off, a CMS with content worth migrating.
4. 04Your payment reality. Card with 3-D Secure is the baseline. Pay by Bank over Open Banking, Direct Debit through Bacs, and the now FCA regulated buy now pay later providers are separate pieces of work with separate costs.
5. 05The real budget range and the real deadline, plus what happens if it slips.
6. 06Who signs off, and how many of them. Three approvers with equal authority is a schedule risk, and an honest supplier prices it as one.

Reading the proposals

Signs of a serious proposal

• It restates your problem in its own words, and gets it right.
• It counts unique templates rather than pages. Templates are where the cost lives.
• Content is a named line item with an owner and a date, because copy is what makes most projects late.
• It assumes you own the domain, DNS and hosting accounts. Vagueness about who holds the registrar login is a lock-in you will pay to undo.
• It names a performance target and says how it gets measured after launch, not just on launch day.
• It says what is not included. A proposal with no exclusions has not been thought about.

Signs to walk away from

• A price with no scope attached, arriving within an hour of your enquiry.
• Guaranteed first place on Google. Nobody can sell you that, and offering it tells you what else they will say.
• A portfolio of sites you cannot open, or case studies with impressive percentages and no named client behind them.
• A monthly fee covering hosting and "maintenance" that never defines maintenance in hours or scope.
• No mention of consent, accessibility or data anywhere in it.

Three questions worth asking on the call

1. 01Who will actually do the work, and will I speak to them or to an account manager?
2. 02If we part ways after launch, what do I have? Press for specifics on the repository, the CMS content and the hosting account.
3. 03Show me something you built two years ago. A site that still loads fast and still gets updated says more than any launch announcement.

On working with a team outside the city

We are based in Dubai and work with UK clients remotely, so treat this as interested advice rather than neutral advice. The practical question is overlap. Dubai runs four hours ahead of GMT and three ahead of British Summer Time, so a full working morning here sits inside your working day, while calls after about four in the afternoon UK time are unlikely. That suits written updates and a fixed weekly call. It does not suit a client who expects to walk into a Jewellery Quarter studio unannounced. Ask any remote supplier how they cover the hours you cannot reach them.

When two proposals differ by a large margin, the cheaper one is usually missing content, accessibility or post launch support. Ask both firms to price those three items and the gap explains itself.

If you want a second opinion on a brief or a quote you have already received, send it over. If we are the wrong fit, we will say so.