What to leave out of a website brief

Leave the visual execution — exact colours, fonts, layout composition, imagery style choices beyond a general direction — to the designer’s professional judgement, and reserve the website brief for what the site must do, contain and achieve. A web design brief that specifies every visual decision does not produce a more controlled result. It produces a design assembled from instructions rather than judgement, and it is usually worse for the money, because the supplier is being asked to execute someone else’s visual decisions rather than apply the expertise being paid for.

The distinction: requirements versus instructions in a website brief for your project

A requirement states a constraint the finished design has to satisfy: “the phone number must be visible without scrolling”, “the site must load quickly on a mobile connection”, “the layout must work for someone using a keyboard only”. An instruction states how to satisfy it: “put the phone number in a green button in the top right”, “use lazy-loaded images”, “add a skip-to-content link”. A brief should be full of the first kind and largely empty of the second. The first is what the business is qualified to know — what it needs. The second is what a designer is qualified to decide — how to deliver it.

What tends to belong in a website brief template regardless

Belongs in the brief	Usually best left to judgement
Pages, functions and who supplies content	Exact layout of any individual page
Brand assets that already exist — logo, established colours	New colour or type choices beyond matching the existing brand
Accessibility and device requirements (“must work on mobile”)	The specific technique used to achieve them
Tone in one or two words (“straightforward, not corporate”)	The exact wording of every heading
Number of images needed, and who supplies them	Cropping, composition and exact placement
Review and approval process	How many draft concepts to produce internally before sharing one

A brief also reasonably includes items that are not about visual execution at all: budget, any GDPR or privacy obligations the business already knows apply to it, and a short list of competitors whose sites illustrate a tone or feature worth referencing. None of these are instructions about layout — they are facts about the project a designer cannot otherwise know, which is exactly why they belong in the brief rather than being left to judgement.

Why over-specifying costs more than it protects

Specifying visual execution in detail has two costs.

The first cost: it is frequently wrong

A business owner describing “clean and modern” in prescriptive terms is usually describing a look they have seen once, somewhere. Translating a feeling into a rigid instruction produces a worse version of that feeling than a designer working from the underlying brand and audience would produce unprompted.

The second cost: it removes the expertise being paid for

A designer who is handed an exact layout to execute is doing production work, not design work. Production work is priced and delivered differently, usually with less room to catch a problem the instruction itself created.

A short test for whether something belongs in the brief outline at all

Before writing a line into the brief, ask whether the business is genuinely the party best placed to decide it, or whether it only feels that way because the business is the one paying.

What passes the test

Budget, deadline, required functions and existing brand assets pass that test easily. Nobody outside the business can know them.

What fails the test

Exact visual execution usually fails it. The person best placed to judge how a layout should actually work, given everything else on the page, is the person whose job is layout — not the person whose job is running the business the layout serves.

What technical requirements — accessibility included — genuinely should be specified precisely in a web design project

Accessibility and device requirements belong in the brief as constraints, not instructions, because they are outcomes the business needs regardless of how they are achieved. “Must be usable by someone with a screen reader” is a requirement. “Add ARIA labels to every button” is an instruction about a technique, and most businesses briefing their first site are not in a position to know whether that technique is even the right one for the situation. State the outcome and let the person doing the work choose the method. This is the same logic explored from the opposite direction on writing a brief without the vocabulary.

The one thing that should never be left out even though it feels like a detail

Whatever else is left to judgement, the brief must still state the review and approval process — how many draft concepts will be shown, who reviews them, and what happens if the first concept is rejected. This is not a design decision, it is a process requirement, and leaving it unstated is a common source of disputes late in a project, because “how many revisions are included” is a commercial term, not an artistic one, and it belongs with the other commercial terms in what a brief must contain.

Where to see what a professional agency’s default proposal actually looks like

Website design services describes what a typical engagement includes as standard, which is a useful reference for calibrating how much of the visual process is normally handled without a business needing to specify it at all — reading it before finalising a brief tends to shorten the visual-instruction section rather than lengthen it, once it is clear how much of that ground a supplier already covers by default.

What to do next with your website brief and budget

Go through the draft website brief and mark each line as a requirement (an outcome the business needs) or an instruction (a method for achieving it). Keep the requirements. For the instructions, ask whether the underlying need can be restated as a constraint instead. If it genuinely cannot, that is worth a direct conversation with the web design supplier, not a line buried in the document.