Call for Tender: Redesign and Maintenance of IEA Bioenergy Website
Jul 2026
BulletinsPublications
The IEA Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme (IEA Bioenergy TCP) is seeking tenders from qualified organizations to redesign the IEA Bioenergy website, migrate the content, and take care of the annual maintenance of the new website.
It is expected that the contract will be awarded between October and November 2026. The work should commence in December 2026 or January 2027 at the latest, and it should be completed by July 2027 (including migration of the content).
The closing date for submission of tenders to arossi@biosmartstrategies.com is the 4 September 2026.
Clarification questions may be sent until 12 PM CEST on 2 September. The questions and the related responses will be published in the table below
CLARIFICATION QUESTIONS
| Clarification Question | Response | |
| 1 | Have I understood correctly that the €50,000 covers the design and migration, and that a separate quote needs to be provided for maintenance? | That is correct. The US$50,000 cap (please note that this is USD and not EUR) is for design and migration. A separate quote should be provided for the annual cost for website maintenance. |
| 2 | As I understand it, ETA Florence will retain full responsibility for the content and will also upload the relevant texts, videos, etc. to the website itself, as well as running the webinars? Does that mean no support costs need to be factored in for this? I’m asking because I’m not entirely clear whether the webinars will be run via the website, and whether technical support will be required for this? | That is correct. Content management (other than the migration of existing content) and organization/management of events (e.g., webinars) are not covered by this tender, so no support costs should be factored in for these activities.
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| 3 | Content and Migration Scale: Could you provide the approximate total volume of content currently hosted across the 20 multisites? Specifically, what is the estimated number of pages, PDFs, publications, and media files that require migration? |
Pages: around 600 PDFs: around 8,000 Publications: around 4,000 |
| 4 | Members’ Area Authentication: Is the current members’ private area integrated with an external identity management system (e.g., Azure AD, OAuth, or an external CRM), or does it rely solely on native WordPress user credentials? | Members’ Area Authentication rely solely on native WordPress user credentials. |
| 5 | Brand and Visual Assets: Does IEA Bioenergy already have updated brand guidelines, UI kits, or style guides ready for the redesign, or is the contractor expected to develop the visual identity from the ground up? | The website should be developed based on IEA Bioenergy’s visual identity, which already exists (even though we have no dedicated manual/guidelines on it). |
| 6 | Accessibility Auditing: To meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards, does IEA Bioenergy expect a third-party audit and formal certification, or will standard automated testing and self-certification by LOBA’s QA team suffice? | Self-certification by LOBA’s QA team is sufficient. |
| 7 | Are independent web studios eligible to apply, provided they can meet the technical, migration, accessibility, and maintenance requirements? | Yes, independent web studios are eligible to apply, provided they can meet the technical, migration, accessibility, and maintenance requirements described in the call. |
| 8 | Please confirm whether a tender may be submitted by a prime contractor with a fully disclosed specialist delivery partner or consortium member, and whether the required three redesign examples, three maintenance examples and three client references may include qualifying work performed by that named partner and the proposed personnel. | Yes to both questions, as long as responsibilities, ownership, personnel, relevant experience and contractual accountability are clearly identified. |
| 9 | Must all three contactable references be third-party clients, or may references include partner organisations or responsible persons for candidate-operated properties? | Ideally, at least some of the contactable references would be third-party clients, while the rest could be partner organizations. |
| 10 | Could you please confirm whether the website redesign will involve upgrading the content management system, or is the focus primarily on enhancing the site’s connectivity, visuals and user experience? | The redesign should involve all of these elements. |
| 11 | Are there any specific accessibility guidelines or technical standards that must be adhered to during the migration process? | Tenderers should describe their proposed approach to content migration, including all relevant technical specifications. |
| 12 | Would the maintenance phase include ongoing content support, or is it strictly limited to technical maintenance and security updates? | Maintenance would be strictly limited to technical maintenance and security updates. |
| 13 |
Is WordPress an acceptable/preferred CMS for the replacement site?
|
WordPress would be acceptable. There is no preferred CMS. |
| 14 |
I would like to confirm whether the three required redesign
examples, three maintenance examples and three contactable references must all be projects delivered specifically under the tenderer’s own legal entity, or whether projects personally delivered by the proposed lead
consultant may be used and clearly identified as such.
|
It is fine if part (but not all) the examples and references are
from projects personally delivered by the proposed Lead Consultant.
|
| 15 |
Could you please confirm whether reference contact details may be
provided under separate confidential cover, or immediately upon shortlist, provided the tender identifies the organisations, project scope, launch date, and relationship? We want to obtain each referee’s consent before sharing personal contact details.
|
It would be fine to provide the contact details of referees after you have been shortlisted.
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| 16 | Are there geographic hosting/data-residency restrictions beyond those in the published tender document? | There are no specific geographic hosting/data-residency restrictions. |
| 17 | For the approximately 8,000 PDFs and 4,000 publication records, should tenderers include document-level accessibility remediation/OCR, duplicate cleanup, broken-link repair, and metadata normalization within the USD 50,000 design-and-migration cap, or should we assume file-preserving migration with current metadata and price remediation only for an agreed priority subset? If a priority subset is intended, will IEA Bioenergy provide the selection criteria or a content inventory? | The USD 50,000 budget for the website redesign and migration should include the migration of the full existing content repository, including the approximately 8,000 PDFs and 4,000 publication records identified in the clarification published on the IEA Bioenergy website. The scope is primarily intended to cover the migration and preservation of the existing content and associated metadata, rather than a comprehensive editorial or document remediation exercise. In particular, tenderers should not assume that the scope includes systematic OCR, document-level accessibility remediation, duplicate-content clean-up, or general metadata normalization of the existing repository. The migration should, however, include the necessary validation and reconciliation procedures to ensure that the migrated content and documents remain accessible and correctly associated with their records. Similarly, links affected by the migration should be identified and corrected as part of the migration and validation process. No priority subset of documents is currently envisaged. Tenderers should therefore base their proposals on the migration of the complete repository. We would expect the tenderer to propose an appropriate content inventory and migration methodology as part of the detailed migration strategy requested in the tender. As specified in the tender, particular attention should also be given to preserving existing search engine visibility and indexing, including URL mapping, 301 redirects for pages and downloadable files, preservation of metadata, sitemap management and post-launch monitoring. |
| 18 | Are there any mandatory minimums for prior contract value, years of operation, turnover, insurance, or public-sector/international-or |
There are no mandatory minimums for these factors. |
| 19 | Are there specific legal-entity or location requirements for applicants? | No. |
| 20 | Content structure: Do the 20 current sites share a consistent theme and page structure, or does formatting vary significantly from site to site? Understanding this will help us scope the migration accurately. | The current website consists of a central website and dedicated websites for the Tasks and selected Strategic Projects. The structure and content types are not necessarily fully consistent across all sites. |
| 21 | Taxonomy: The new site is organized around three themes (Scaling Sustainable Biomass Supply; Advancing Bioenergy Conversion Technologies; Markets, System Integration, and Governance of Bioenergy), which implies every asset gets re-classified. Will IEA Bioenergy provide a finished taxonomy and content map for this, or is defining that part of the tenderer’s scope? | The three themes described in the tender provide the intended high-level content structure. The detailed taxonomy, tagging structure and content mapping should be proposed by the tenderer as part of the website design and migration approach, in consultation with IEA Bioenergy. The tenderer should therefore include the development and implementation of the detailed content classification and mapping methodology in its proposal. |
| 22 | Content retirement: Does all existing content migrate to the new site, or is there an audit process where older material is routed to the archive repository instead? If so, is that archive a separate destination, or a filtered view within the same content library? | The intention is to preserve the existing content rather than undertake a broad deletion exercise. As part of the migration, content may be reviewed and appropriately classified between current content and the repository/archive for older documents. The archive is intended to form part of the new website ecosystem and should remain searchable and accessible through the website. Tenderers should describe how they would recommend managing this classification as part of their migration approach. |
| 23 | Design inputs: Are there existing brand guidelines to work from, or does the redesign include developing a new visual identity? | The redesign is intended to develop a new visual design for the website based on the existing IEA Bioenergy identity and communication requirements. The tender does not require the development of a new corporate/brand identity. |
| 24 | URL structure: The Task and project sites currently run on subdomains (task39, task44, task41project6, etc.). Is the intent to consolidate these into subdirectories on the new single site? | The intention is to consolidate the current Task and Strategic Project websites into a single website. The final URL structure has not been prescribed and should be proposed by the tenderer as part of the information architecture. However, the migration must include appropriate URL mapping and permanent redirects from the existing URLs to the corresponding new URLs in order to preserve existing links, indexing and search engine visibility. |
| 25 | Members’ area: Could you share more detail on how the current gated content works? Are member accounts created manually, or can members self-register? And for access tracking, what specific metrics are you looking to capture (unique users, download counts, login frequency, etc.)? | Member accounts are created manually. Unique users and download counts could be useful metrics for tracking access. |
| 26 | Accessibility: For WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, are you expecting automated testing and remediation, or a third-party accessibility audit as part of the engagement? | WCAG 2.2 AA compliance is expected for the new website and its templates/components. Tenderers should describe their approach to accessibility testing and remediation, including the tools and procedures they propose. A specific third-party accessibility audit is not prescribed by the tender, but tenderers may include such an audit in their proposal if they consider it appropriate. |
| 27 | Data protection: Beyond GDPR, are there other specific data protection regulations or requirements we should account for given your 25 member countries? | The website and its associated processing of personal data should comply with GDPR and other applicable data protection requirements. The tender does not prescribe additional country-specific requirements for each of the 25 participating parties. Tenderers should identify any relevant data protection considerations arising from their proposed technical solution and clearly indicate how these will be addressed. |
| 28 | Delegated editing: For the nominated Task and Strategic Project leads, are you envisioning editor-level access scoped to their respective page trees, or full administrator privileges? | The intention is that nominated persons from each Task and Strategic Project should be able to manage and update the content relating to their respective Task/project without requiring advanced technical skills. Access should preferably be scoped to the relevant page/content area rather than providing full administrator privileges. Tenderers should propose an appropriate role and permission structure that allows delegated content management while maintaining appropriate security and overall control of the website. |
| 29 | The assumption that materially changes our migration plan is whether the roughly 8,000 PDFs and 4,000 publications should keep their existing metadata, or include normalization and deduplication within the US$50,000 design-and-migration cap. If bidders are expected to state an assumption, is it safe to price the tender on preserving the existing metadata as-is? | Yes, it is safe to price the tender on the basis that the existing metadata will be preserved as-is; systematic metadata normalization and deduplication are not required within the US$50,000 design-and-migration cap. |
| 30 | Site inventory: Could you share a full list of the 20 current site URLs (central site plus Task and Strategic Project sites)? If content is gated, can you share for review? |
Currently, there are 19 sites: ieabioenergy.com |
| 31 | Gated content access: For content behind the members’ area, is access uniform for all members, or are there different permission groups with access to different content? If groups exist, how is that access currently determined and managed? | Currently, access to the members’ area is uniform for all members. |
| 32 | Existing tagging: Is content in the current WordPress sites tagged or categorized consistently today, or is it largely untagged? | The tender does not prescribe a specific assumption regarding the consistency of the existing tagging and categorization. Tenderers should assess the current structure as part of their migration approach and explain how existing categories/tags would be mapped to the new taxonomy. |
| 33 | Could you please confirm whether the actual hosting infrastructure and recurring hosting/cloud provider charges should be included in the quoted annual maintenance price, or whether these costs will be contracted and paid separately by IEA Bioenergy? | The annual maintenance price should cover the tenderer’s technical maintenance and support activities as described in the tender. Hosting infrastructure and recurring hosting/cloud provider charges may be quoted separately from the annual maintenance fee. |