How to write a website design brief

Most website briefs we receive are a list of pages and a deadline. Home, About, Services, Contact, "something like our competitor but cleaner", live by the end of the quarter. It is enough to get a quote. It is not enough to get a good one, because every agency reading it fills the gaps differently, and the gaps are where the money is.

A useful brief answers the questions a designer cannot answer by looking at your current site. There are five of them. Get those right and the document can be a page long.

What the website is for

Not "to look professional". What has to happen more often, or stop happening, once the new site is live. More demo requests from the right companies. Fewer support tickets asking where pricing is. A trial sign-up that does not need a sales call first. One or two of these, with a number if you have one, is the most valuable sentence in the brief, because it is the thing the design gets judged against.

If you cannot name the number yet, say so and say what you would measure. "We get about forty enquiries a month and roughly a third are a poor fit" tells a designer more than three paragraphs about your values.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

Name the buyer. Job title, company type, what they already know, what they are comparing you against. A site selling to a CTO who benchmarks before talking to anyone is a different site from one selling to a marketing director with a deadline, even if the product is the same.

Then name who it is not for. Agencies waste more design time on the second group than the first: a page built to reassure a buyer you do not want, a feature list for a segment you stopped serving. Saying "we are not for solo traders" or "we do not want enquiries under £10k" in the brief saves a week of argument later.

What proof you have

The names, numbers and quotes you are allowed to use. Client logos, results with a figure attached, review scores, awards, press, a founder who is willing to be on camera. Also the proof you have but cannot publish, because that changes what the design has to do: a site that cannot name its customers has to work harder in other ways.

Most of the briefs we see undersell this. The company has a customer list worth naming and a benchmark result nobody has written down, and the brief says "we would like some testimonials". Write the proof down first; the structure of the site tends to fall out of it.

What already exists, and what has to stay

The current site, with a frank line on what works and what does not. Analytics access, or at least the top ten pages and where traffic comes from. The brand assets you have and whether they are fixed. The CMS your team can run, or the one they cannot. Pages that rank and must keep their addresses, because a redesign that loses the rankings you already earned has cost you twice.

If the content has to be written from scratch, say so here. It is the single thing most likely to move the launch date, and a brief that pretends the words exist produces a quote that pretends it too.

The constraints

Budget, as a band. Not because an agency will spend to the top of it, but because a brief with no number gets three incomparable quotes. Deadline, and what is driving it: a conference, a funding round, a product launch. Who signs off, by name, and whether that person is in the room. Anything legal, accessibility standards you must meet, languages, regions, integrations that cannot change.

A brief with a band, a date and a decider is one an agency can price in a day. Without those three, the first call is spent recovering them.

A brief is not a specification. It is the five things a designer cannot guess.

What to leave out

Page lists, unless a page is a legal requirement. Colour preferences, unless the brand is fixed. Competitor sites you like, unless you can say what you like about them: "the pricing page, because it compares plans without a form" is useful, a link on its own is not. Feature lists for the product; the site is not the product.

And the phrase "clean and modern". Every brief has it, so it tells the reader nothing, and it has been used to describe every site built in the last fifteen years, including the one you are replacing.

A brief in a minute

We built a brief writer that asks the four questions above in plain language and hands you a written brief at the end, whether or not you ever talk to us. It takes about a minute. Agencies you send it to will quote faster and closer, and if you send it to us a senior designer replies with an honest band and a date.

If you are weighing a redesign rather than a new site, the website redesign page covers the five signs it is time and how we keep what already ranks. For what a build includes stage by stage, see website design.