What a website brief must contain

A website brief must contain nine things: what the site is for, who it is for, the pages it needs, the functions it needs, who supplies the content, who supplies the images, the budget range, the deadline, and who has authority to approve the final version. Leave out any one of the nine and a supplier is quoting against a guess. The guess is where the gap between quotes comes from.

Purpose and audience come first in a website brief, and both need a sentence, not a paragraph

State what the site is for and who it is for in two sentences a stranger could repeat back accurately. “A site for tradespeople to find us and call for a quote” is usable. “An engaging digital presence that reflects our values” is not, because it gives a designer no way to check a finished page against it. The audience sentence matters as much as the purpose sentence. A site built for existing customers to check opening hours needs almost none of the persuasion work a site built to win first-time enquiries needs. A brief that states only the first without the second gets both jobs done partway.

Page count and the site’s technical requirements have to be numbers for the project

State how many pages you expect, even as a rough figure, because pages are close to the largest single driver of both cost and time on a brochure-style build. “Somewhere between five and twenty” is not a number a supplier can quote against. It is two different projects. Page count and how to arrive at one covers how to reach a workable figure without guessing.

Functions define the scope of the brief, and have to be named individually, not implied by a category

List every function the site has to perform: a contact form, a booking calendar, a product catalogue, a members-only area, a payment gateway. List these as separate line items rather than folding them into a single word like “ecommerce”, because that word covers builds that differ by a factor of ten in cost depending on what sits behind it. Functional vs content requirements goes into why this distinction matters more than it looks.

Who supplies the words and the pictures has to be stated, not assumed

State plainly whether the business is writing its own website copy or the supplier is, and whether photography is already available or needs to be commissioned. This single item is one of the most common sources of a mid-project blow-out, because “content” quietly means different things to different suppliers. Some quote on the assumption the client delivers finished copy; others quote a copywriting service as included. A brief silent on the point gets read whichever way suits the reader.

The nine items, as a brief template and outline

Item	What “stated” looks like
Purpose	One sentence describing the job the site does
Audience	One sentence describing who it is for
Page count	A number, even if rough
Functions	A list, not a category word
Content ownership	Who writes the copy — business or supplier
Image ownership	Who supplies photography — business, supplier or stock
Budget range	A figure or bracket — see the page on disclosing one
Deadline	A date, and whether it is fixed or a preference
Sign-off authority	Named person who approves the final site

Budget, deadline, quote and success metrics are not optional extras

A budget range lets a supplier propose a build that fits it, instead of a build sized to their own default package. Budget ranges and how to disclose them covers the actual trade-off in stating one. A deadline that is fixed — an event, a launch, a financial year — changes which suppliers can even take the work. A deadline that is a preference should say so, so a supplier does not price in rush fees for a date nobody insisted on. Naming who has final sign-off authority prevents the single most common late-stage delay: a design approved by one manager and reopened by another once the invoice is due.

What to deliberately leave out of the nine items

None of the nine items above requires stating exact colours, fonts or layout preferences, and adding that detail does not make the brief more complete — it just adds instructions in place of requirements. What to leave out of a brief covers this distinction directly; the short version is that the nine items above are the ceiling of what most businesses need to specify, not the floor of a much longer document.

What a complete brief buys you from an agency’s proposal that an incomplete one does not

A complete brief lets you compare quotes on price and approach, because the job being priced is the same job in every quote. An incomplete brief lets you compare only which supplier assumed the smallest project, which is not the same thing as which supplier is cheapest for the job you actually need done. This is the entire argument for the nine items above: none of them makes the brief longer for its own sake, and each one closes a specific gap a supplier would otherwise have to guess across.

Write a brief any web supplier can quote against walks through these nine items as a short set of questions in your browser. It assembles them into a document you can send to more than one supplier, so the comparison you get back is the one you actually wanted.

What to do next when writing your own website briefs

Draft the nine items in whatever order comes easiest, then read them back as though you were a supplier who has never spoken to you. Anywhere the sentence could be answered two different ways, it is not yet specific enough to send.