Your project bid can make or break your chances when it comes to landing a particular client. However, investing too much time in a project bid doesn’t make good business sense: you don’t get paid for the time that goes into creating your proposal. So any tool that can streamline the proposal process and help you turn out a high-quality proposal is worthwhile. And if it’s built on a system that you may already be familiar with — like WordPress — that’s even better.
WPBids is exactly that: a specialized WordPress theme that generates a clean proposal. You don’t have to learn any new software or even build templates of your own, although WPBids has many customization options. All you have to do is add the information for your current project, publish it, and send your prospective client the URL.
Managing the Proposal Process
WordPress offers several benefits for managing the proposal process that may not be obvious. More often than not, proposals these days are handled online. You may be used to emailing PDFs, but offering your client the ability to easily look over a proposal on a web page and comment right there is convenient. It’s also a far easier format to work with if your client depends on a mobile browser for handling email and other communication. And if you’re presenting your proposal in person, you only have to worry about internet access — not having all the necessary files.
Hopefully, you need to manage multiple proposals at the same time. WPBids creates a home page for your proposals, so you can take a look at everything you have on your hands at the moment. Because you’ll likely build up an archive of older proposals, you can sort by the date, client name, and other criteria, so you can quickly find old proposals.
One of the major concerns with putting proposals online is how secure they are, both from your competition and your other clients. WPBids has built in the ability to password protect bids. You also have the ability to print out a version of each bid formatted for the printer if you come across a client who wants you to mail or fax a proposal.
Taking Your Proposals to the Next Level
The truth of the matter is that most proposals are built off of templates: no matter what sort of services you provide to clients, there are many similarities between what you’ll do for a client tomorrow and what you’ll offer next week. That means that you can rely on a template that you simply customize to each prospective client. WPBids makes it easy to turn an existing proposal into a template that you can rely on. It’s also very easy to go back and edit an existing template — as easy as editing a post in WordPress.
Within WPBids’ tools, you have many options for customization. The theme comes with four different color options for your proposals. But modifying WPBids beyond a simple color change is easy. By using WordPress’ built-in ability to use child themes, you can quickly roll out even more customized versions. With WPBids comes the Photoshop PSD originally used to build it, so that you can modify the graphics in the design quickly. The developers even include a stripped down child theme so that, if you’re inclined, you can recreate the theme in your own style.
Making Use of WPBids
To use WPBids, you do have to have your own domain name and hosting — but if you have an existing domain name, you certainly won’t need to buy another just to run WPBids.
WPBids is available for $59. For that price, you can use it as many times as you like, on as many different domains as you need to. And if proposals are important to your business, that’s a bargain.