What to put in a website brief, and what to leave out
A brief isn't a specification. Its job is to help the people you're approaching understand the problem well enough to tell you how they'd solve it, and roughly what that takes. One honest page beats twenty hopeful ones.
What to include
Why now. Something changed: you've outgrown the site, a new service launched, sales keep apologising for the website. That trigger tells a studio more than any feature list.
What the site has to do. Pick one or two jobs. "Get qualified enquiries from facilities managers" gives a designer something to work with. "Look modern" doesn't.
Who it's for. Describe real customers and what they're trying to decide when they arrive. Include the awkward ones, like the procurement team who only want a PDF.
What already exists. Your current site, your brand files, your analytics access, and any content you already have. Say honestly how ready it is, because content is often the largest variable in cost and time.
Constraints. A fixed launch date tied to an event. Systems it has to connect to. Languages. Regulation. Anything you can't change.
A budget range. It feels like giving something away. It doesn't. A range lets a studio tell you what's realistic, and suggest what to do first if the scope and the money don't match. Without one, you get proposals that are hard to compare.
How you'll decide. Who has the final say, and when. Projects tend to slip because of a decision made late by someone who wasn't in the room, far more often than because of anything technical.
What to leave out
- A sitemap you've already finalised. Share your thinking, but leave room for someone to disagree. That's part of what you're paying for.
- Colour and font choices, unless they're existing brand rules.
- A long list of features from competitors' sites. Link to them instead, and say what you like about them.
- Vague adjectives. "Clean" and "professional" mean something different to everyone. Links to three sites you like, with a sentence on why, do that job far better.
A template you can copy
Answer these in a sentence or two each:
- What's prompting this project now?
- What are the one or two things the site must achieve?
- Who are the main visitors, and what do they need to decide?
- What exists already, and how ready is it?
- What's fixed: dates, systems, languages, regulation?
- What's the budget range?
- Who decides, and by when?
Seven answers will get you more useful proposals than most fifty-page tender documents. And if you can't answer one of them, that's worth knowing before you start.