Before any build starts, we try to answer one question honestly: is this a fixed-scope website, or is it the start of an ongoing engineering relationship? Getting that wrong is the single biggest source of scope creep we have seen, on either side of the table.
A marketing site or storefront has a real edge — pages, features, and a launch date. A product with logic behind it does not, and pretending otherwise with a fixed quote sets everyone up for a bad time three months in.
So the first conversation is rarely about design. It is about which of those two shapes the work actually is, because that answer decides the contract, the timeline, and who is on the other end of the inbox afterward.
If you are not sure which one describes what you need, that is a completely normal place to start a conversation from.