What to prepare before contacting a web developer

In short

• Bring eight items to the first call: goal, page list, content, brand files, account access, legal data, integrations and budget.
• Nine in ten Belgian firms with ten or more staff have a website, so quality of brief separates them.
• Missing content, not code, is the most common cause of a late launch, and only you can supply it.
• Put the domain in your company's name, because .be names held by agencies cause disputes.
• Belgium adds multilingual copy, mandatory Peppol B2B e-invoicing since January 2026, and EU accessibility rules.
• A written brief with a budget range and one decision maker turns a guess into a fixed price.

Introduction

Most Belgian business owners contact a web developer with a deadline and a vague idea, then spend the next three months answering questions that could have been settled in a single afternoon. The result is predictable: quotes that cannot be compared, a project that slips every time a photo or a paragraph is missing, and a final invoice that includes work nobody planned. This post is the preparation checklist we hand to clients before the first meeting. It covers the eight files and decisions that let a developer quote accurately, plus the Belgian rules on domain ownership, invoicing, privacy and accessibility that shape the job. Read it once, gather what you already have, and the first call becomes a scoping conversation instead of an interview.

Why an unprepared brief costs more than a prepared one

A developer prices uncertainty. When the goal, the page count or the content is unclear, the quote either grows a margin to absorb the unknown or moves to an hourly model where every unanswered question becomes billable time.

Belgian agency rates sit between €80 and €150 per hour excluding VAT, with freelancers around €500 to €700 per day. At those rates, four weeks of back-and-forth over missing text and unconfirmed page lists costs more than a copywriter would have charged to write the content properly. The same logic applies to decisions: every week a logo file or a hosting password stays missing is a week the project cannot finish.

Delay has a second cost that rarely appears on an invoice. A site that launches in March instead of November loses a full winter of enquiries, and in a market where nine in ten enterprises with at least ten employees already have a website, the competitor with a working site is the default choice. Preparation does not remove every risk in a build, but it removes the cheapest and most common ones: ambiguity about scope, ownership and timing. An hour spent writing your brief is usually the highest return on the whole project.

Settle the goal, the audience and the one action

Write half a page before you write anything else. What must the website achieve in the next twelve months, expressed as a number? Fifteen qualified quote requests per month, forty online bookings, a shorter sales cycle for your two main services, or online sales that cover a monthly target. Without a number, nobody can tell afterwards whether the site worked.

Then describe the person you are talking to: a procurement manager at a mid-sized manufacturer, a couple renovating a house in Leuven, a tourist looking for a table tonight. Note how they search and what they need before they act: an indicative price, a delivery time, a certificate, a portfolio. This is the raw material for page structure and copy, and it is the question a good developer will ask in the first five minutes.

Finally, name the action each page should trigger and the baseline you are starting from. If your site already exists, bring last year's enquiry count, the traffic sources in your analytics, the search terms that already bring visitors and the pages that convert. If you are starting from zero, bring what you know from the phone and the inbox: which services get asked about, which objections come back, which customers are worth more. A single page of these facts saves a discovery workshop and gives the developer something concrete to design against.

Write down the pages and the content you already own

A page list with one sentence of purpose per page is worth more than a mood board. Start with the pages you know you need: home, services or products, about, contact, and any legal pages. Then decide what each must do and what proof it needs: a case study, a price indication, a certificate, a delivery map. This is also where you decide what to leave out, because a focused eight-page site outperforms a twenty-page site nobody maintains.

Content is the critical path of every website project. Developers can build around missing images for a while, but they cannot launch a page without text, and most late launches trace back to content that arrived after the design was approved. Decide up front who writes each part: you, an internal colleague, the developer, or a copywriter. If copywriting is not in the quote, ask for a price per page, and ask who is responsible for the facts, the prices and the legal wording.

For a shop, add the product file: names, descriptions, prices, VAT rates, stock, variants, weights, shipping rules and returns. For a service business, add the five questions customers ask before they buy and the answers you usually give on the phone. Belgian sites normally need Dutch, French and English, and each extra language typically adds 30 to 50% to content and development cost, so agree who translates and how the copy is checked per locale.

Gather the brand files and check the rights

Bring the logo in a vector format, ideally SVG, AI, EPS or a PDF exported from the design file. A JPEG pulled from a letterhead or a screenshot from Facebook cannot be scaled, and redrawing it costs money that adds nothing to the result. Include the colour codes, the fonts and, if you have one, the brand guide.

Check what you are allowed to use. Fonts need a licence that covers web use, and desktop licences usually do not. Photographs need a licence or a signed agreement with the photographer, and photos of identifiable people need their consent, which is a separate matter from owning the file. Supplier logos in a "trusted by" section need permission as well. If the brand is new or the logo predates your current activity, a trademark check in the Benelux register at BOIP costs little and prevents an expensive rename later.

If there is no logo, no font and no photography, say so in the brief and budget for it. A developer can work with a temporary wordmark, but discovering in week six that the brand needs to be created is how a fixed price turns into a change request. The same applies to tone of voice: three adjectives and one example of writing you like are enough, and they save a round of revisions.

Audit your domain, hosting and account access

Your domain is the one asset no supplier should ever hold. DNS Belgium counted 1.70 million active .be names at the end of 2025, with 207,776 new registrations during the year, and its managing director has publicly warned that names registered in an agency's own name cause problems in disputes and can even be lost. Check the registrar, the registrant name, the admin contact and the expiry date before you contact anyone, and move the name into your company's account if it is not there already.

Then make the inventory. Where is the site hosted, who controls DNS, who holds the CMS admin, analytics, the Google Business Profile and the social accounts? Which email addresses run on the domain, and which provider handles them? Moving a site without a record of the mail settings is how a launch silences a business for a day: MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records have to move with the domain, not after it.

Put every credential in a password manager you control and share access through named accounts rather than a single shared login. A simple table with system, owner, login and renewal date is enough. If nobody in the company knows who owns the domain, that is the first problem to solve, not the last.

Prepare the legal and administrative file

A developer needs your legal identity to build a compliant site: registered company name, KBO/BCE enterprise number, VAT number and registered address, checkable for free in the KBO/BCE Public Search and VIES. Those details appear in the footer, the contact page, the privacy policy and the invoice, and getting them wrong is a correction nobody enjoys.

Under the GDPR you are the data controller for everything the site collects, not your supplier. List what you collect through forms, newsletters, bookings and analytics, why you collect it and how long you keep it. List the cookies and trackers currently on the site, including the ones installed by plugins. The Belgian Data Protection Authority requires consent before non-essential trackers are placed, and a banner that can be dismissed by scrolling is not consent. Decide who writes the privacy policy and in whose name it is published.

Accessibility is now part of the file too. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, with EN 301 549 as the technical benchmark; micro-enterprises with fewer than ten employees and turnover under €2 million are exempt, but any service aimed at consumers falls in scope and needs an accessibility statement. Mention any sector rules that apply to your profession, and ask the developer how they test keyboard navigation, contrast and form labels. Building that in costs a fraction of retrofitting it.

List the integrations, payments and daily workflows

Describe how a customer becomes an invoice today, because the website has to fit that process or replace it deliberately. Which CRM, booking tool, accounting package, stock system or ERP do you use? Who answers the enquiry, in what tool, and how fast? A form that sends an email nobody monitors is worse than a phone number.

Belgian invoicing has a hard deadline of its own. Since 1 January 2026, structured e-invoicing through Peppol is mandatory for domestic B2B transactions between VAT-registered businesses, and the obligation covers receiving as well as sending, under the EN 16931 standard. If the site generates quotes or orders, ask how those reach your accounting package and whether the integration produces a Peppol-ready invoice.

For a shop, payments are local first. Bancontact accounts for roughly seven in ten Belgian online payments, with some sources closer to 78%, so it belongs in the first release alongside cards, PayPal or a wallet if your customers use one. List refunds, shipping zones, VAT rates and delivery promises, since each one is a setting someone has to build. Finally, gather test accounts and API keys for every system, or agree who will create them and when. Integrations are where estimates move most, and each unknown one adds a buffer.

Bring a budget range, a decision maker and a date

Give a range, not a single number. A Belgian brochure site typically lands between €2,000 and €8,000, an e-commerce build between €8,000 and €25,000 or more, and agency work is invoiced at €80 to €150 per hour excluding VAT. A range tells the developer which solution fits and lets them propose the trade-offs, while a number pulled from the air invites a quote built to match it rather than to serve you.

Compare three-year cost, not the invoice. Add hosting, domain, licences, maintenance, the second and third language, content production and the updates you will want in year two. A cheaper build that needs replacing in eighteen months is the expensive option.

Name one decision maker with the authority to approve scope, design and content, and agree how fast that person will respond during the project. Two owners with different opinions is the most reliable way to double a timeline. Then set the date: the real deadline driver, the content deadline that precedes it, and the weeks when your team is unavailable, including the August slowdown that many Belgian SMEs still live with. Close the brief with the numbers you will check after launch, so success is a shared definition rather than an argument in month four.

Next steps

1. This week: write the one-page goal, audience, action and baseline, then verify the registrant of your domain.
2. Within two weeks: draft the page list, name a content owner per page, and gather the logo, fonts and access inventory.
3. Within a month: settle the legal file, the integrations and a budget range, then brief three suppliers with the same document.
4. Before signing: confirm ownership, milestones, response times and content deadlines in the contract.

Preparation is the cheapest part of a website project and the part that sets its price. If you want a second opinion on the brief before you send it, our guide to choosing a web developer in Belgium covers the questions to ask on the other side of the table.

Need expert guidance? Contact Omnistack