A multicultural team brainstorming and collaborating during a business meeting.

30 September 2026

How to Write a Website Brief That Saves You Time and Money

“We just want a nice website, nothing fancy.” Plenty of web projects start with a line like that, and there’s nothing wrong with it as an opener. The trouble starts when it’s also the whole brief. Every designer you speak to fills the gaps with their own guesses, so the quotes come back miles apart and the one you pick gets built on assumptions nobody checked. A proper brief sorts that out. It doesn’t need to be long. It does need to be specific.

In brief

Two pages of plain English will do more for you than twenty pages of wish list.
Say what the site has to get people to do, and how you’ll count it.
List every system it has to connect to, from the booking tool to the newsletter, because that’s where the surprise costs hide.
Replacing an old site? The old pages and the domain belong in the brief too.

Why vague briefs end up costing more

Picture a holiday cottage business asking three agencies for “a modern site with online booking”. One quotes for a simple enquiry form. Another assumes a full availability calendar linked to the channel manager the owners already use. The third plans to build a booking system from scratch. Three prices. None of them wrong, and none of them comparable.

It gets worse once work starts. Every unanswered question turns into an email, a call or a change request. A few are quick fixes. The painful ones mean redoing a page template somebody signed off a fortnight ago. Nobody’s trying to rip you off. They just weren’t told.

When every supplier is pricing the same job, the gaps in what’s included jump out at you. Our piece on spotting padding and red flags in web design quotes goes through the lines worth questioning.

Start with what the site is for

Before colours or features, write down what the website should get people to do. One or two things. A café might want table bookings and fewer calls asking about gluten-free options. A precision engineering firm is more likely after quote requests from buyers who’d never ring first. A local charity usually wants two things at once, volunteers and regular donors.

Then say how you’ll know it’s working. In Google Analytics 4 the actions that matter can be marked as key events, which Google pitches as a way to measure what’s important to your business and see which channels bring it in. Put that list in the brief, so the tracking goes in on day one and you don’t find out six months later that nobody was counting the form submissions.

Describe the people you’re trying to reach as well. Who are they, and what do they ask before they buy? Got a list of the questions customers ask on the phone? Stick it in. It’s gold for whoever writes the pages.

Pages, content and who’s doing what

List the pages you think you need, even roughly. Services, about, contact, maybe a page for each type of job. It gives everyone a starting point, and a decent designer will suggest changes. There’s more on getting the structure right in our guide to planning a business website from first idea to launch. Mark the pages you most want people to land on, because that shapes how the site’s internal links get planned later. Each of those pages will want its own title and description in Google too, and our guide to writing page titles and meta descriptions shows what to put in them.

Then be blunt about content. Who’s writing the words? Who’s supplying the photos? Late copy is one of the usual reasons a project drags on for months. Doing it yourself? Give a date you can actually hit. And if you’d rather the agency wrote it, say so up front, because that changes the price.

Say who’ll run the site after launch. A roofer who adds a job photo once a month needs something very different from a shop adding forty products a week. If nobody in-house will touch it, mention that you’d want updates, backups and security handled for you, whether that’s through a website care plan or something similar.

Systems, forms and the legal bits

This is where surprise costs hide. Write down every system the website has to talk to. Booking tools. The accounts package. A CRM. The email newsletter. A stock feed from the warehouse. Even “we’d like enquiries to go to two inboxes” deserves a line.

Forms need their own section. What does each one collect, and where should it end up? Under UK GDPR, when you collect someone’s details directly you have to give them privacy information at the time you collect it, which the ICO spells out in its guidance on the right to be informed. In practice that means a privacy notice people can find from the form, planned in from the start.

Tracking is similar. The ICO’s guidance on cookies and other storage and access technologies was updated after the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and it still starts from consent. Cookies, tracking pixels and scripts need it unless an exception applies. One exception covers analytics used only to improve your own site, but only if you explain it clearly and give people a simple, free way to object. So list the tools you use or plan to use, like analytics, ad pixels or a chat widget, and let the designer plan how consent works. That’s general information rather than legal advice.

Replacing an existing site

If there’s already a website, say which pages bring in visits and enquiries. Google’s site move documentation says to map every old address to its new one, use permanent server-side redirects, and keep them for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Ask for that mapping to be part of the job. It’s easy to leave out of a quote and painful to fix later.

Note where the domain name is registered and whose name it’s in. It should be in your business’s name, with contact details somebody actually checks. For domains like .com, ICANN’s rules say a registrar must suspend or cancel a name if the contact details are knowingly wrong, aren’t updated within seven days of a change, or its accuracy queries go unanswered for more than 15 days. A .co.uk name follows Nominet’s rules instead.

Budget, deadlines and what ‘finished’ means

People get twitchy about putting a budget in a brief. Leave it out, though, and you’ll get proposals for anything from a template to a fully bespoke build. A range is fine. If you’d like a feel for the numbers first, the free website estimate on our home page gives an indicative figure from a few questions.

Next, separate the dates that can’t move from the ones you’d simply like. A trade show is fixed. So is a second branch opening, or the start of your busy season. A garden centre launching a new site in April is making life hard for itself.

Then say what ‘finished’ looks like, beyond “it looks nice”. Two standards help here. For accessibility, ask for WCAG 2.2 at level AA, which is the latest version of the W3C’s guidelines. For speed, Google’s Core Web Vitals give clear targets. In plain terms, the main content should be on screen within 2.5 seconds and the page should visibly respond to a tap, click or key press within 200 milliseconds. Nothing should jump about either. The layout-shift score needs to be 0.1 or less. Those are measured at the 75th percentile of real visits, on mobile and desktop separately. All of that just needs writing down so it gets tested.

A simple structure you can copy

This covers most businesses, and it rarely runs past two or three pages.

The business in a paragraph, and anything that’s changed recently.
What the site is for, and the two or three actions you’ll measure.
Who it’s for and what they ask before buying.
The pages you think you need.
Who writes the copy, who supplies photos and who updates the site later.
Every system it connects to, plus the forms and tracking tools.
The current site, the pages worth keeping and where the domain is registered.
Budget range, fixed dates, and your accessibility and speed targets.
Two or three sites you like, with a line on why.

Don’t skip that last one. “I like how their prices are laid out” tells a designer far more than a bare link ever will. Send the brief along with our questions to ask a prospective web design agency and those first calls get a lot more useful.

Want a second pair of eyes on it?

Even a rough brief puts you in a far better spot to compare suppliers and get a price you can trust. If you’d like help shaping yours, or want someone to check it before it goes out, that’s where our website design service for businesses starts. Drop us a line and we’ll tell you what’s missing, and whether you need a full build at all.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

Let’s have a chat