How to Write a Website Brief (With a Template You Can Copy)

A good website brief answers nine questions: what the business does, who it is for, what you want visitors to do, what you have now and why it is not working, which pages you need, what functionality is non-negotiable, who your competitors are, what your budget range is, and when you need it live. Everything else is detail.

You do not need a design background to write one. You need about ninety minutes and a willingness to be specific, and it will save you more money than any other ninety minutes you spend on the project.

Why a vague brief costs you real money

When a brief is vague, the designer guesses. When the guess is wrong, you get a revision round. Revision rounds are the single largest source of overrun on web projects, and the ones caused by an unclear brief are the most expensive kind because they usually mean going backwards, not forwards.

There is a second cost that is harder to see. A vague brief makes quotes incomparable. If three studios each guess differently at scope, their prices are not measuring the same thing, and you end up choosing on price for work that is not equivalent. That is how people end up disappointed by the cheapest quote.

The nine questions

1. What does your business actually do? Written as you would explain it to someone at a party, not as it appears in your company brochure. If you sell three things and 80% of revenue comes from one of them, say so — that changes the entire structure of the site.

2. Who is it for? Not "everyone". Age range, how technical they are, whether they are buying for themselves or for a company, what they are worried about, whether they will be on a phone standing outside your building. A site for facilities managers looks nothing like a site for brides.

3. What is the single thing you want a visitor to do? Book, call, buy, request a quote, download something, apply for a job. If you name five, you have named none — pick the one that matters most and rank the others under it. This question decides more about the design than any other.

4. What have you got now, and what specifically is wrong with it? "It looks dated" is a start. "It looks dated, nobody can find the pricing page, and the contact form has been broken since November" is a brief. If you have analytics, note where people leave.

5. Which pages do you need? List them. Home, about, three service pages, contact — write it out. This is the single biggest driver of the quote, and vagueness here is the main reason quotes vary wildly.

6. What must the site actually do? Take payments, take bookings with real availability, gate content behind a login, calculate a quote, sync with your CRM, support two languages. Separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves honestly. Everyone's nice-to-have list is longer than their budget.

7. Who are your competitors, and which sites do you like? Send three or four links with one line each on what you like or hate. "I like this one because the pricing is clear" is worth more than a mood board. Include one you dislike — knowing what to avoid is genuinely useful.

8. What is your budget range? People withhold this believing it stops them being overcharged. In practice it mostly guarantees a mismatched proposal. A range is enough. If you are not sure what is realistic, say what the site is worth to you — how many enquiries a month would justify it.

9. When do you need it live, and is that date real? A trade show, a funding round or a lease ending is a real deadline. "Soon" is not. Real deadlines change what is possible and everyone needs to know about them early.

The template

Copy this, fill it in, send it out.

BUSINESS
What we do (plain English):
Where we're based / who we serve:
The one sentence I'd want on the homepage:

AUDIENCE
Who buys from us:
What they're worried about before they buy:
Mostly mobile or desktop:

GOAL
The single most important action a visitor should take:
Secondary actions, in order:
How we'll know the site worked (a number, if possible):

CURRENT SITE
URL:
What specifically isn't working:
What we want to keep:

SCOPE
Pages we need:
Must-have functionality:
Nice-to-have functionality:
Who will update content after launch:

REFERENCES
Sites we like, and why (3-4):
A site we dislike, and why:
Competitors:

PRACTICALITIES
Budget range:
Deadline, and what's driving it:
Who signs off:
Do we have copy and photography, or do we need help:

That last line under Practicalities catches out more projects than anything else on the page. Content is the most common cause of a delayed launch, and the delay is almost never the designer's.

Two things worth saying out loud

Name the decision-maker. Projects stall when feedback arrives from four people who disagree with each other. Someone has to be able to say yes.

Say what you do not want. Constraints help. "No stock photos of people shaking hands", "must work for our 70-year-old customers", "our brand colours are fixed and cannot change" — all genuinely useful, all things a designer would otherwise have to discover through a rejected concept.

What happens after you send it

A good studio will come back with questions rather than a price. That is a positive sign, not a delay — it means they are trying to quote the actual project. If someone sends a number back within an hour without asking anything, they have quoted a guess, and you will meet the difference later as a variation.

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Send us your brief and we will come back with questions first and a fixed, itemised quote second. Start here.