Web Design & Development Proposal for Luminous Collective

The goal here is not a prettier website. It's a sales tool that converts visitors into qualified enquiries — specifically, 3–4 new mid-sized clients per month starting in October 2026. That number is concrete, and it shapes every decision we make about information architecture, portfolio presentation, and contact flow.

Luminous Collective's current site has a conversion problem, not just an aesthetic one. When potential clients can't easily view your reels or find a clear path to getting in touch, you're losing work before a conversation even starts. Your main competitor's recent relaunch makes that gap visible in the market right now — which is exactly why the mid-September 2026 go-live date is non-negotiable, not aspirational.

The core problem we're solving: your portfolio — your single strongest sales asset — is inaccessible. Fast, high-quality reel playback isn't a nice-to-have for an animation studio. It's the entire pitch.

The previous site likely failed Luminous Collective for two reasons we see repeatedly with creative studios: performance was sacrificed for visual ambition (heavy video files hosted directly on-page), and the portfolio wasn't built to update easily, so it went stale. We're not going to repeat either of those mistakes. Vimeo handles the video heavy lifting; the CMS handles the ongoing freshness — and neither of those decisions adds latency to the experience.

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Success, by the end of this engagement, looks like a site that loads fast, showcases your motion work without compromise, and gives a prospective client a frictionless path from "I found you" to "let's talk." That's the brief we're building to — and the benchmark we'll hold ourselves against through QA and beyond launch.

The sequence matters. Before Luminous Collective spends a dollar promoting the new site, the site itself needs to earn the click — which means the portfolio experience, the contact flow, and the Vimeo performance are locked in first. Sending traffic to a broken funnel is expensive. We've seen it happen, and we won't let it happen here.

Our priority in the first two weeks is understanding, not designing. We interview your team, audit your current site's failure points, map the sitemap, and produce wireframes that reflect how a prospective mid-sized client actually moves through your work — from reel to reel, from curiosity to inquiry.

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What the first 30 days look like: By the end of September 2026, Luminous Collective will have a finalized site architecture, approved wireframes, and high-fidelity design mockups for both desktop and mobile. You'll see exactly how the Vimeo embeds behave within the layout, how the portfolio is organized, and how the contact experience is structured. Nothing goes to development until design is signed off. That's not bureaucracy — it's how you avoid expensive rebuilds mid-build.

What we are deliberately not doing in the first four weeks: writing content, shooting assets, or configuring hosting. Those are your inputs, not ours, and the project is scoped accordingly. We need your copy and your Vimeo links ready before content integration begins in Weeks 5 through 7. The sooner those are in our hands, the cleaner the handover.

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On performance — specifically. Animation studios live and die by video quality, and the instinct is always to autoplay everything at full resolution. We push back on that. Our development approach prioritizes lazy-loading, poster frames, and Vimeo's native embed parameters so the Home and Portfolio Detail pages hit a Lighthouse Performance score of 85 or above on desktop. Beautiful and fast is achievable. It just requires discipline in the build.

The final week — October 26 through October 30 — is not an afterthought. It's deployment, QA sign-off, your CMS training session, and formal handover. By October 30, your team runs the site independently. That's the outcome, and that's what the eight weeks are built toward.

This engagement covers a complete redesign and rebuild of luminouscolle.com across five page templates: Home, Portfolio Index, Portfolio Detail, About, and Contact. Every phase feeds directly into the next, and nothing goes to development until the design preceding it has received written sign-off from Luminous Collective's designated approver.

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What's Included

Discovery & UX Strategy

We begin with a structured kickoff to establish priorities, review the competitive landscape — including the competitor site that recently relaunched — and define the audience Luminous Collective is trying to convert into mid-sized client leads. From that foundation, we produce a labelled site architecture and low-fidelity wireframes for all five page templates. This phase exists to resolve structural decisions before anyone opens a design file. Changes at the wireframe stage cost hours; the same changes at the development stage cost days.

Visual Design

Our designer produces pixel-complete, desktop and mobile mockups for all five templates in Figma. The visual direction will reflect the creative-industry aesthetic Luminous Collective operates in — bold, confident, and built around the work rather than around text. Vimeo embed placement is designed in at this stage, not retrofitted later. The design pass includes one round of consolidated client feedback, with revisions incorporated before the Figma file is locked and handed to development.

Development & CMS Build

Front-end development covers all five approved templates, built responsively across desktop (1280px+), tablet (768–1279px), and mobile (below 768px), and QA'd against the latest two versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. The CMS is configured so the Luminous Collective team can create, edit, and reorder portfolio entries independently — each entry supports a Vimeo embed ID, project title, tags, and description. Vimeo embeds are implemented with lazy-loading so reels load on demand rather than degrading page performance on arrival. A contact form with email routing is also included.

Performance, Launch & Handover

Before the site goes live, we run a full performance audit against the Home and Portfolio Detail pages and optimise until both hit a Lighthouse Performance score of 85 or above on desktop. The audit report documents scores before and after, with a record of every change made — so there's no ambiguity about what was done or why. DNS cutover and post-launch smoke testing confirm that all pages, forms, and Vimeo embeds function correctly in production.

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What's Not Included

The following are explicitly outside this engagement. If any of these are needed, they require a separate scope and a separate agreement.

• Copywriting. Luminous Collective supplies all final text for all five page templates. We do not write, edit, or proof copy.
• Video hosting or player development. All reels are served via Vimeo embeds. We do not host video files, transcode footage, or build a custom player.
• Brand identity work. Logo design, identity creation, and brand guideline development are not part of this project. We work with the assets you supply.
• Marketing and SEO campaigns. This project includes on-page technical SEO basics during the build. Paid media, SEO campaign management, and any ongoing promotional activity sit outside this scope.
• Ongoing support and maintenance. A 14-day post-launch warranty covers any defects in what we built. Hosting, ongoing maintenance, and support beyond that window are not included.
• E-commerce, portals, or gated content. None of these features are part of this build.

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The five-template scope is sized to get Luminous Collective in market fast. We recommend resisting the urge to expand the page count during development — additional templates mid-build will push the October 30, 2026 completion date and the promotional runway that depends on it.

The eight-week schedule is built around a hard reality: Luminous Collective needs a live, promotable website before the October client-acquisition push begins. Every phase is sequenced to protect that goal, with no week treated as a buffer.

We have structured the work so that visual design never begins until the architecture is validated, and development never begins until design is signed off. Skipping those gates is the single most common reason creative-industry website projects overrun — and we are not doing it here.

The engagement opens with discovery and UX strategy, and the first concrete deliverable Luminous Collective will receive is the Site Architecture & Wireframes — a Figma file containing a labelled site map and low-fidelity wireframes for all five page templates. This is the structural foundation everything else is built on. It lands at the end of Week 2, on September 18, 2026.

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From there, our UI/UX designer works full-time on visual design for two weeks. The output is the High-Fidelity Design Mockups — pixel-complete desktop and mobile designs for all five templates, with Vimeo embed placement defined and the Luminous Collective brand identity fully expressed. These land on October 2, 2026, closing out the design phase. Sign-off on these two deliverables together triggers the second milestone payment.

Development follows immediately. This is the longest build window in the project, and it carries the two most substantial deliverables: the Vimeo-Integrated Portfolio CMS and the Responsive Production Website. The CMS is purpose-built so the Luminous Collective team can add, edit, and reorder portfolio entries — including Vimeo embed IDs, titles, tags, and descriptions — without touching code. The production site covers all five approved page templates, QA-tested across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints. Both land on October 23, 2026.

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The final week is launch week. We run the pre-launch performance audit, execute the DNS cutover, and conduct post-launch smoke testing across all pages, forms, and embeds in production. Two final deliverables are issued: the Performance Audit Report, documenting Lighthouse scores for the Home and a Portfolio Detail page before and after optimisation — with a confirmed floor of 85 on desktop for both — and the CMS Training & Handover Document, which includes a written guide and a recorded walkthrough screencast. Both land on October 30, 2026.

That's six deliverables across four phases. Nothing in this schedule is speculative. Every phase has a clear input, a defined output, and a named date. If Luminous Collective holds their side of the dependency obligations — consolidated feedback within five business days, assets and copy before Phase 2 — this timeline holds.

Phase schedule

Phase	Dates	Duration	Deliverables completed
Discovery & UX Strategy	Sep 7, 2026 – Sep 18, 2026	2 weeks	Site Architecture & Wireframes
Visual Design	Sep 21, 2026 – Oct 2, 2026	2 weeks	High-Fidelity Design Mockups
Development & CMS Build	Oct 5, 2026 – Oct 23, 2026	3 weeks	Vimeo-Integrated Portfolio CMS; Responsive Production Website
Performance, Launch & Handover	Oct 26, 2026 – Oct 30, 2026	1 week	Performance Audit Report; CMS Training & Handover Document

Deliverables

#	Deliverable	Description	Target date
1	Site Architecture & Wireframes	A Figma file containing a labelled site map and low-fidelity wireframes for the Home, Portfolio Index, Portfolio Detail, About, and Contact page templates.	Sep 18, 2026
2	High-Fidelity Design Mockups	Figma file with pixel-complete, desktop and mobile designs for all five page templates, covering typography, colour, layout, and Vimeo embed placement.	Oct 2, 2026
3	Vimeo-Integrated Portfolio CMS	A CMS-backed portfolio section allowing the client to create, edit, and reorder project entries, each supporting a Vimeo embed ID, project title, tags, and description fields.	Oct 23, 2026
4	Responsive Production Website	The fully coded and deployed website across all approved page templates, passing QA on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints.	Oct 23, 2026
5	Performance Audit Report	A written report documenting Lighthouse scores for the Home and a Portfolio Detail page before and after optimisation, with a record of each change made.	Oct 30, 2026
6	CMS Training & Handover Document	A written guide covering how to add and edit portfolio entries, update page content, and manage the contact form in the CMS, plus a recorded walkthrough screencast.	Oct 30, 2026

The total investment for Luminous Collective's redesign and rebuild is $10,500, a fixed project fee. There is no monthly retainer, no recurring charge, and no media spend involved — this is a single, scoped engagement with a defined end date.

We price this way deliberately. A fixed fee means Luminous Collective knows the exact cost before a single wireframe is drawn, and our team has every incentive to deliver efficiently rather than run the clock.

Payment is structured across four milestones, each tied to a specific moment of agreed progress rather than a calendar date. This protects both sides: you are never paying significantly ahead of value delivered, and we are not carrying the full financial risk to completion.

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A few points worth being direct about:

• The fee covers the full scope as written. If Luminous Collective requests work outside the agreed page templates, CMS configuration, or integration list, we will scope and price that separately before proceeding. No changes are absorbed silently.
• There is no contingency padding hidden in this number. The $10,500 reflects the actual effort required to deliver six named deliverables across an 8-week engagement. It sits comfortably within the $8,000–$12,000 budget range you brought to this brief.
• Payment terms are net 30 days from the trigger event for each milestone — written acceptance, design sign-off, QA pass, or launch acceptance, as applicable.
• Hosting is not included. The CMS platform carries its own hosting cost, billed directly to Luminous Collective by the platform provider. That cost sits entirely outside this engagement.

The milestone schedule and per-payment amounts are set out in the tables below.

Payment schedule

#	Milestone	%	Amount	Trigger
1	Acceptance deposit	25%	$2,625.00	On acceptance of this agreement
2	Discovery & design sign-off	25%	$2,625.00	On completion: Site Architecture & Wireframes; High-Fidelity Design Mockups
3	Development complete & QA passed	35%	$3,675.00	On completion: Vimeo-Integrated Portfolio CMS; Responsive Production Website
4	Launch & handover accepted	15%	$1,575.00	On completion: Performance Audit Report; CMS Training & Handover Document
	Total	100%	$10,500.00

Commercial summary

Item	Detail
Total investment	$10,500.00
Acceptance deposit	25% ($2,625.00) on signature
Payment terms	Net 30 days
Start	September 2026
Duration	8 weeks

We don't work across every industry. We've deliberately stayed close to creative studios — animation houses, production companies, design practices — because those clients have a specific problem that generalist agencies consistently get wrong: they treat video as a static asset. We know how Vimeo's embed API behaves under load, how to lazy-load reels without breaking autoplay policies, and how to build a portfolio CMS that a motion designer can actually update without filing a support ticket.

The work on your account is done by the same people who scoped it. We don't hand off to a junior build team after the kickoff call.

Your $10,500 investment sits comfortably within our project range for a studio of Luminous Collective's scale — this isn't a stripped-back version of a bigger engagement. It's the full process: discovery, architecture, high-fidelity design, a proper CMS build, and a performance audit against a documented benchmark. You get all six deliverables, not a curated selection.

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On the question of what happens after launch — we're direct about this. Our scope ends at handover on October 30, 2026. What we hand you is a site built for speed and self-sufficiency: a Lighthouse Performance score of 85 or above on desktop for your Home and Portfolio Detail pages, a trained CMS, and documented processes so your team isn't dependent on us the moment something needs updating.

If you want ongoing support after launch, that's a separate conversation. We don't bundle it in and inflate the price. You decide what you need, when you need it.

To move forward, sign and return the proposal along with the $2,625 acceptance deposit. Once both are received, we will confirm your project start date of September 7, 2026 and schedule the kickoff call with our team.

Before that call, we need three things from you:

• Vimeo account access — admin or contributor-level so we can test embed behavior and load performance directly
• Brand assets — any existing logos, fonts, color references, or brand guidelines in their current form
• Stakeholder availability — at least one decision-maker confirmed for a 90-minute kickoff session during the week of September 7, 2026

We recommend treating that kickoff session as a real working meeting, not a formality. The decisions made in Week 1 directly shape the visual direction in Week 3 — delays here compress design time later.

This pricing — $10,500 total — is held for 14 days from the date this proposal is issued. After that, we cannot guarantee the September 7, 2026 start date or the figures above.

Reply to this proposal to confirm, and we'll send the agreement the same day.