Admin roles and content responsibility are not defined
What it leads to. The brief lists the sections but doesn't say who fills them in or how. The contractor plans for a single admin account and sample content, while on the client side news is handled by the press office, documents are posted by a lawyer, and citizen requests are reviewed by a separate staff member. At sign-off it turns out there's no permission structure, so everyone edits everything. A separate dispute is who translates and publishes content in all three languages: the contractor treats it as the client's job, the client treats it as part of site delivery.
How to write it right. A dedicated section with a table of roles — administrator, news editor, document publisher, request handler — and what each role can access. Alongside it, who prepares and enters live content for each language, how much content the contractor populates before handoff, and what the client delivers as finished text.
No requirements for hosting, backups, or load
What it leads to. The brief describes the site as a product, not as a running service. It doesn't say whose infrastructure hosts it, who pays for hosting and the domain after delivery, how often backups are taken, or how long they're kept. The result: the site is accepted, and a few months later, after an outage, there's nothing to restore. Load comes up separately too — publishing an important document brings a spike in visitors, and a site sized for an ordinary day goes down.
How to write it right. An operations section: where the site is hosted and on whose account, who administers the server after delivery, backup frequency and retention, and the recovery procedure. Plus expected peak load and a requirement to confirm it with a load test before the acceptance certificate is signed.
Migrating old materials isn't mentioned at all
What it leads to. A government organization's existing site usually has years of accumulated material — news, orders, reports, forms. The brief doesn't mention any of it, as if the site were being built from scratch. The contractor prices the work without migration, the client assumes the archive will move over on its own. At the final stage, either the archive is lost along with the external links pointing to it, or it gets migrated in a last-minute scramble at the expense of everything else.
How to write it right. A migration section: which sections of the old site are carried over, which are archived, which are deliberately dropped. Separately, preserving page addresses or setting up redirects to new ones so external links keep working. The volume of material to migrate should be stated in the brief itself, not left for later clarification.
Sign-off is described in terms of "how it looks"
What it leads to. Wording like "the site must match the approved design and work correctly" doesn't give anyone grounds to accept or reject the work. The committee opens the homepage, looks at it, and offers opinions on colors and block placement — at a stage when changing them is too late. Meanwhile the functions that actually matter go unchecked: whether a citizen's request reaches the right staff member, whether a document keeps its formatting on upload.
How to write it right. An appendix with acceptance scenarios: specific actions and expected results. An editor publishes a news item in all three languages — it appears in every version. A citizen submits a request — it lands in the registry and the responsible staff member gets notified. A visitor turns on the version for visually impaired users — the setting persists across pages. The acceptance certificate is signed once the scenarios pass.
Accessibility and mobile speed aren't set as measurable targets
What it leads to. The version for visually impaired users is named in the brief but reduced to a font-size button and a black-and-white theme. Real accessibility — keyboard navigation, image descriptions, screen reader support — isn't tested, so the site formally meets the requirement while staying unusable for the people it's meant for. Mobile speed usually isn't mentioned at all: the site gets built with heavy photos, and on a phone in the region it loads slowly.
How to write it right. Specify the accessibility standard the site is checked against and how it's verified. For speed, set a measurable load-time threshold for key pages on a mobile connection, name the measurement tool, and require that the results be attached to the acceptance certificate.
It's not stated who gets the source code and access credentials
What it leads to. The brief ends with the site going live. What the client receives beyond a working address isn't described. As a result the source code stays with the contractor, the domain is registered to one of their staff, and server access is handed out by phone call. The next tender for improvements turns into a problem: a new contractor can't get started, and the client ends up going back to the previous one not out of satisfaction, but out of necessity.
How to write it right. A section on deliverables: source code with change history, rights to use and modify it, domain and hosting accounts registered to the organization, an administrator guide and an editor's manual in the language staff work in. Handover is confirmed by a signed certificate and tied to the terms of final payment.
Requirements are written so loosely that bids can't be compared
What it leads to. When the site is described in general terms, every contractor scopes the work differently. One bid includes archive migration, server setup, and staff training; another covers only page layout from the list. Prices end up far apart, and comparing them is pointless. The client picks the cheaper bid, then finds out everything it left out. Some contractors don't even bid, unable to tell where the work's boundaries are.
How to write it right. Spell out in the brief everything that affects cost: the volume of material to migrate, the number of content language versions and who prepares them, the scope of training, the post-launch support period and what it covers. The more concrete the boundaries, the closer the bids land to each other, and the more meaningful the competition becomes.