Luxury Website RFP Scorecard and Checklist

Hiring a luxury website team is easier when you evaluate proposals on the same scorecard. This page is a practical RFP checklist and scoring model for interior designers, architects, galleries, photographers, yacht brokerages, and luxury real estate firms. Copy it into your next search. Adjust weights to match your risk tolerance, then force every vendor through the same numbers so charisma does not beat fit.

Use beside how to select a marketing agency for interior designers, 12 essential website features, and The Luxury Web Index 2026.

Before you send an RFP

• Write the business outcome. More qualified residential inquiries, fair applications, charter weeks: name it.
• Nombre the users. Principal, assistant, art buyer, committee: who actually browses?
• Inventory constraints. CMS skills on your team, languages, integrations, legal review.
• Set a real budget band. Hide the band if you want, but know it internally.
• Assign a decision owner. Committees without owners buy delay.

Qué hacemos to request from every vendor

• Three relevant case studies with their role stated honestly (design, dev, SEO, ongoing).
• A proposed sitemap for your firm, not a generic creative deck only.
• Technical stack and hosting posture, including performance and accessibility approach.
• SEO and AI-visibility foundations included or clearly excluded.
• Content responsibilities: who writes, who photographs, who enters data.
• Timeline with dependencies you must staff.
• Fixed fee vs time-and-materials boundaries and change-control rules.
• Post-launch support terms in hours per month, not vibes.

The scorecard (100 points)

Craft and taste - 25 points

Do their luxury references look like your ambition? Judge live sites, not slides. Penalize template residue and motion that fights the work.

Relevant experience - 15 points

Have they shipped in your vertical or an equally discreet one? Adjacent excellence can beat same-vertical mediocrity.

Information architecture - 15 points

Did they understand your inventory of projects, vessels, artists, or listings? A thoughtful sitemap beats a pretty homepage concept.

Technical quality - 15 points

Performance budget, CMS fit, accessibility, analytics, forms that actually deliver, staging, and security basics. Ask who maintains plugins and dependencies.

SEO and AI visibility - 10 points

Canonical strategy, structured data, content model, internal linking, and a point of view on assistants that cite sources. "We do SEO" without a method scores low.

Process and communication - 10 points

Meeting cadence, feedback tools, who attends, how decisions are logged. Luxury projects fail more often on process than on fonts.

Commercial clarity - 10 points

Scope boundaries, payment schedule, kill fees, IP ownership, and third-party costs. Ambiguity here becomes conflict at launch.

Red flags

• They refuse to show comparable live work.
• They promise rankings as a contractual guarantee.
• They dismiss content and photography as "your job" without helping you plan it.
• They cannot explain hosting and updates in plain language.
• The only person you meet is sales; the makers stay hidden until signature.
• The timeline assumes you have unlimited internal hours you do not have.

Scoring session agenda (60 minutes)

• 10 minutes: each scorer submits numbers silently.
• 20 minutes: discuss spreads larger than 10 points on any category.
• 15 minutes: call references with the same three questions.
• 15 minutes: decide or name the single missing proof required to decide.

Three reference questions that matter

• Qué hacemos surprised you after kickoff?
• Cómo did they handle a scope disagreement?
• Would you hire them again for a different vertical or only the same work?

Lightweight RFP email template

"We are commissioning a new website for [firm], a [vertical] practice based in [city]. Business aim: [outcome] in [timeframe]. Please send: relevant live work, a draft sitemap, team bios for people who would staff us, timeline, commercial structure, and what you need from us to hit quality. Deadline: [date]."

Short RFPs from serious buyers attract better studios than twenty-page questionnaires copied from enterprise IT.

Scope modules you can mix

• Discover. Interviews, analytics review, sitemap, success metrics.
• Design. Art direction, templates, component library, motion rules.
• Content. Copywriting, photography direction, migration.
• Build. CMS, integrations, localization, accessibility.
• Launch. Redirects, QA, training, analytics validation.
• Care. Monthly hours, SEO retainers, experiment backlog.

Ask vendors to price modules transparently. Bundles are fine; opacity is not.

Cómo to evaluate creative chemistry

Hold a short working session before award: a live critique of your current site and a sketch of information architecture changes. Pay a small fee if needed. You will learn more in ninety minutes of real work than in ninety slides of case studies.

Contract clauses worth insisting on

• IP ownership of custom design and code upon payment.
• Raw files and component documentation at handoff.
• Staging environment access for your team.
• Performance targets stated as goals with measurement method.
• Data handling for forms and analytics in plain language.
• Exit assistance if you change vendors later.

Internal readiness checklist

Vendors fail when clients disappear. Before you hire, confirm: decision owner, weekly feedback window, photography plan, content approvers, and a freeze rule for scope fantasies mid-build. Write those into your side of the kickoff deck.

When not to run a full RFP

If you already trust a studio that has done adjacent work, a structured sole-source proposal with this scorecard applied internally can be faster and kinder to everyone. RFPs are tools for uncertainty and fairness, not rituals required by the universe.

Sample weighting variants

A gallery with strong in-house taste might raise craft to 30 and lower relevant experience to 10. A multi-language brokerage might raise technical quality and process weights. Publish the weights in the RFP so vendors know how you will judge them. Surprise criteria create theater proposals.

After you choose

Send a clear decline to other finalists with optional feedback. Luxury industries are small. Cómo you hire becomes part of your reputation among makers you may want later. Then schedule a kickoff that includes the true decision owner and the photography plan, not only brand moodboards.

Discovery questions vendors should ask you

Strong partners ask about average project value, sales cycle, who influences the buy, content operations, and what failed last time. If a vendor asks only about colors and logo files, they are decorating, not designing a business asset.

Total cost of ownership

Add five-year CMS care, asset production, and training to the build fee before you compare vendors. The cheapest proposal with no care plan is often the most expensive site you will re-buy in eighteen months.

Cómo Nakada Design helps

Nakada Design is a luxury marketing agency in Los Angeles. We build websites, SEO programs, and AI-aware acquisition systems for principals hiring a website or marketing partner.

To put this into practice for your firm, start with selecting a marketing agency and our work, or consultar with a short note about the work.

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