Almost every website project that goes wrong goes wrong at the brief. Not because the brief was badly written, but because it described what the site should look like rather than what it needs to do.
A good brief lets three agencies quote on the same thing, which is the only way to compare prices meaningfully. It also protects you: anything not in the brief is a change, and changes are where budgets go.
- 1
Start with the business problem, not the website
Write a paragraph on what is not working now. "We get enquiries but they are the wrong sort." "People cannot find our opening hours and ring up instead." "We cannot update anything without paying someone." The website is the proposed solution; the brief should start with the problem it is solving.
- 2
Describe who it is for, specifically
List the two or three types of person who will use the site and what each needs from it. A golf club might list visitors wanting a tee time, members wanting results, and the office wanting to update both. Different audiences with different needs is the single biggest driver of how a site gets structured.
- 3
Define what success looks like in numbers
More enquiries is not a goal. Twenty enquiries a month instead of eight is. Even a rough target changes what gets built — and it gives you a way to judge afterwards whether the money worked. If you genuinely do not know the current number, that is your first finding.
- 4
List what must be on the site and what must be possible
Separate content from capability. Content is the pages you need. Capability is what has to work: online booking, a members area, a form that goes into your CRM, a shop, multiple languages. Capability is what drives cost, so vagueness here is what produces quotes that vary by a factor of five.
- 5
Say what you will maintain yourself
Be honest about who will update the site and how confident they are. A site the team can genuinely edit is built differently from one an agency maintains. Getting this wrong is why so many sites are frozen a year after launch — the CMS was built for someone more technical than the person who inherited it.
- 6
State the constraints you actually have
Budget range, deadline and why, brand guidelines, existing systems it must work alongside, anything that cannot change. Withholding the budget does not get you a better price; it gets you proposals you cannot afford and proposals that miss the point. A range is enough.
- 7
Include what you already have
Current site, analytics access, existing photography, written content, logo files, domain and hosting details. Whether decent content and photography exist changes the scope substantially — and it is usually the thing that delays a project rather than the build itself.
What to leave out
Resist specifying the design. "Modern and clean" appears in every brief ever written and tells nobody anything. Sharing three sites you like, and being precise about what you like in each, is far more useful than adjectives.
Also leave out the technology unless you have a genuine constraint. Naming a platform in the brief narrows the field before anyone has understood the problem, and often for reasons that turn out not to matter.
A rough length
Two to four pages is right for most small business projects. Under one page and it is not a brief. Over ten and you have written a specification, which is a different document and usually premature.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, as a range. A website can reasonably cost two thousand or eighty thousand pounds depending on scope. Without a range, agencies are guessing at which project you want, and the quotes become impossible to compare.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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