What a website brief should contain

Send the same badly written brief to three agencies and you will get back three proposals that cannot be placed next to each other. One assumes a six-week build, one assumes six months, and the difference has nothing to do with how good either agency is — it comes from each one privately deciding what you meant by "modern, professional website that reflects who we are" and pricing their own guess. This is the normal outcome of the normal brief, and it is not the agencies' fault. They filled in blanks you left them.

The instinct when writing a brief is to describe the site you want: the pages, the feel, maybe a couple of competitor sites you admire. That instinct is not wrong — a supplier does need to know what you're picturing. But it tells them nothing about what they're allowed to spend, who has to sign off, what already exists that they're not allowed to break, or when the thing needs to be live. Those are the questions that actually determine the shape of a proposal, and a brief that skips them isn't lean — it's outsourcing its own most important decisions to whichever supplier guesses closest to what you had in mind.

The fix is not a longer brief. It's a different one: mostly constraints, with the desired outcome as one section among several.

Skip this exercise if the site is one person

Everything below assumes a company: a decision process, more than one stakeholder, a budget that has to clear finance. If what actually needs a website is one person — a consultant, a founder without a company site yet, someone whose CV should double as a URL — none of that machinery applies, and building it anyway turns an afternoon's job into a six-week engagement with a supplier. For that job reach is the strongest answer available: upload a CV and a photo, answer a short form, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds, live at a free subdomain in under two minutes. There's no brief to reconcile against a supplier's guess, because there's no supplier and no committee — the person deciding what the site says is also the one signing off on it.

It's worth being precise about where that stops applying. reach makes exactly one page — one index.html, no sub-pages — and has no CMS, no contact form (the contact section is a mail link, not a form that posts anywhere), and no way to connect a domain you already own; a custom domain has to be bought through reach itself, at $4.99 a month or $49 a year. The instant the job needs more than one page, or a site a team maintains together, the rest of this article is the relevant one, because now there is a decision process and constraints worth writing down before anyone gets a quote. Prices checked August 2026.

The six sections, in order

Business context. Two or three paragraphs on what the company does, who it sells to, and what commercially depends on the site — leads, direct sales, credibility for a sales team that closes deals elsewhere, recruitment. This lets a supplier tell the difference between a site that needs to convert and a site that needs to reassure, which changes almost every downstream recommendation.

The job of the site. Not "what pages should it have" but what the site needs to do, stated as an outcome someone could later check. "Generate qualified demo requests from mid-market prospects" is a job. "Look professional" is an adjective, and no supplier can build toward an adjective without inventing the rest of the specification themselves.

Constraints. This is the section most briefs skip entirely, and it does the most work. What platform, if any, are you locked into or actively moving away from? What integrations have to keep working — a CRM, a booking system, an email platform, single sign-on for a client portal? What brand guidelines, legal requirements, or accessibility standards are non-negotiable? A supplier who knows the site has to keep talking to a fifteen-year-old inventory system prices and plans differently than one who assumes a clean slate.

Budget range. Covered below — it's the item most people get wrong on purpose.

Decision process. Who signs off, and in how many rounds. If three departments each get a review pass before anything ships, say so — that's a real cost in time and in the supplier's own planning, and pretending the decision is simpler than it is just moves the discovery of the real process into the middle of the project.

Timeline. Not just a launch date but what's driving it. A trade show on a fixed date is a different kind of deadline than "sometime this quarter would be nice," and a supplier who knows which one they're dealing with can tell you honestly whether the date is realistic instead of finding out together, later, that it wasn't.

Why the budget range earns its place, not costs you money

The instinct to hide the budget comes from a reasonable-sounding fear: state a number and every quote will land suspiciously close to it. In practice the opposite failure is far more common and more expensive. Omit the number and you get proposals spread from a fifth of what you'd actually spend to five times it, because "build us a website" describes a category of project that legitimately costs anywhere from a few thousand dollars to well into six figures, and suppliers price to their own default scope in the absence of a signal. You then spend real hours filtering mismatched quotes down to the two or three that were ever in your range — hours a stated number would have saved everyone, including the suppliers who wasted their own time scoping something you were never going to buy.

State a range, not a single figure, and the fear mostly resolves itself: "$15,000–$25,000" tells a supplier what tier of project this is without handing them a number to anchor precisely to. A competent agency proposes toward the value it can deliver inside that range rather than straight to its ceiling, and one whose honest quote sits well above it will say so immediately instead of letting you find out three rounds in.

Success criteria a supplier could actually dispute

Most briefs state goals in language nobody could disagree with, which is exactly the problem — a claim nobody can disagree with is also a claim nobody can be held to. "Increase engagement" and "modernize our online presence" both pass that test and both are useless, because at the end of the project no one can point to a number and say whether it happened.

The fix is to write criteria specific enough that a supplier could, in principle, push back on them. "Reduce the number of steps in the demo-request form from six to three" is checkable — someone counts the steps before and after. "Cut homepage load time on mobile to under two seconds" is checkable with a stopwatch and a real device. "Give the sales team a way to update the pricing page themselves without filing a dev ticket" is checkable by asking someone from sales to try it. Each tells the supplier, before the project starts, what they're actually accountable for. An agency that knows its default stack can't hit "under two seconds" owes you that information at the proposal stage, not the retrospective.

List the existing assets honestly, including the awkward ones

Every brief lists what exists — brand guidelines, a logo file, maybe old copy to reference. Fewer briefs list what's actually awkward, and that's the part suppliers most need before they quote. If the current site runs on a platform nobody on staff understands, say that. If the domain is registered under a former employee's personal account, say that too — it changes the first two weeks regardless of what gets designed. If there's a CRM integration held together by a script one contractor wrote three years ago and never documented, that's not a footnote — for a project like replatforming without losing rankings, it's frequently the single detail that determines whether a migration takes two weeks or two months. Suppliers who find these things out during discovery instead of the brief either pad their quote to cover the risk, or don't, and the awkward fact becomes a change order later, at a worse price than mentioning it upfront would have cost.

Pre-empt the questions a good supplier will ask anyway

A genuinely competent supplier will still come back with questions after reading all six sections — that's a feature of taking the project seriously, not a gap in the brief. But a brief can pre-empt the most common of these. Who owns the content after launch, and will they actually keep pages updated? Does the site have analytics installed, so the supplier can see real traffic numbers rather than your description of them? Are there brand or legal reviewers who haven't been mentioned but will, in practice, need to sign off? Answer these three inside the brief and you eliminate most of the back-and-forth that otherwise happens before a firm quote.

Who ends up writing this brief

The six sections assume someone inside the business is willing to do the constraint-gathering work before a single supplier conversation starts — pulling the budget number from finance, confirming the decision process, being honest about the CRM script nobody wants to touch. Who's best positioned to do it depends on how the project will be staffed once the brief goes out: the tradeoffs differ for an agency, an in-house team and a freelancer, laid out in agency versus in-house versus freelancer. What doesn't change is the underlying logic — a redesign brief and a new-build brief share the same six sections, for the same reason a bad one of either kind produces proposals nobody can compare. Whether the project is warranted at all before it gets scoped is a separate, prior question, covered in the redesign decision.

A brief this specific takes longer to write than "modern, professional website that reflects who we are." It also takes one draft instead of three rounds of revisions to find out what everyone meant.