Why most website briefs miss the point
Ask ten teams to share their website project brief and you will usually see two extremes.
On one side is the three-line email: “We need a modern website, mobile friendly, SEO ready. Please send your quote.” It is fast to write and impossible to estimate from. Everyone fills in the gaps with their own assumptions, and every proposal describes a different project.
On the other side is the twenty-page requirements document full of internal jargon, unprioritised wishlists, and copied sections from old RFP templates. It looks detailed but hides the central questions: what does this site need to achieve, and what are we realistically willing to invest to get there?
Both versions make it hard for senior specialists or solo agencies to respond with something useful. The first forces them to guess. The second buries the signal under a pile of noise.
This article is about the middle ground: a clear, focused website project brief that a senior specialist can read once and immediately understand what you need, why it matters, and whether it is a good fit for them. It will not turn a bad project into a good one, but it will massively increase your chances of getting accurate proposals and realistic timelines.
If you want to see how this looks in a structured form, your site already has a project brief flow that turns these ideas into a guided form.
The real job of a website project brief
A good brief does not try to be a contract or a technical specification. Its real job is simpler and more practical.
It should make it easy for someone outside your company to answer a few key questions:
What problem is this website solving for the business over the next 12–24 months?
Who is going to use it, and what do they need from it?
What exists today, and why is it not enough anymore?
Which constraints are non-negotiable—budget, timeline, integrations, regulations?
What does success look like from your side once the project is live?
If a brief gives clear answers to those questions, technical decisions become much easier. If it does not, every conversation starts with detective work instead of planning.
The essential sections of an effective web brief
There is no single correct template, but most strong briefs share the same sections.
They start with context: who you are, what you sell or provide, and which market you operate in. This does not have to be long; a few paragraphs that would make sense to someone outside your industry are enough.
Then they describe the current state. What does your existing website look like? How old is it? Which parts work well, and which parts definitely do not? Linking to your current site and calling out specific pages is more useful than abstract statements about “modern design”.
Next they define goals. Do you want more qualified leads, better positioning, easier hiring, or a credible presence for a new market? “More traffic” is not a complete goal; neither is “better branding”. Useful goals sound like “increase qualified inquiries by 30% over 12 months” or “close the gap between our actual pricing and what the site signals”.
After that comes scope. At a minimum, list the pages or sections you know you need: homepage, service pages, contact flow, supporting pages like about, FAQ, legal. If you already know you need specific features—for example, a project brief flow, a newsletter sign-up, or a basic resource section—mention them here.
Finally, there are constraints: budget range, preferred timeframe, known integration requirements, languages, or compliance needs. These are the parts you cannot negotiate away, so it makes sense to put them on the table early.
If you cover those pieces in two to six pages, you are ahead of most briefs specialists see.
How much detail is enough?
The hardest part of writing a brief is deciding what to leave out.
You do not need wireframes if you are hiring someone specifically for information architecture and UX. You do not need to dictate technology choices if you have chosen a specialist for their stack. You do not need ten examples of competitor sites when three good ones will do.
What you do need is enough detail for someone to understand the scale of the website and the complexity of your environment.
If you have strict brand guidelines, link them.
If legal or compliance requirements affect content or data storage, describe them simply.
If you already have copy drafts, mention which pages are covered and which are not.
Anything that has the potential to change scope or timeline belongs in the brief. Anything that is just “nice to know” can usually wait until later conversations.
For a deeper look at how those decisions affect budget and calendar, you can pair this article with the guides on web development costs and project timelines.
Budget and timeline: why hiding them backfires
There is a common instinct to leave budget and timeline out of the brief in the hope of getting a “pure” estimate. In practice, this almost always backfires.
Without a budget range, specialists have to choose between guessing high to stay safe or guessing low to stay competitive. Both guesses can be wrong in ways that waste time. Proposals that look cheaper may simply ignore important constraints. Proposals that look expensive may be realistic but impossible to compare.
The same goes for timelines. If you secretly have a hard deadline, not stating it upfront forces everybody to discover the problem in the middle of the project when adjustments are much harder.
You do not need to share final numbers. A range is enough. Saying “We are thinking in the €15k–€25k range with a target launch in April” will produce a much more useful conversation than “Please send your best price”.
Common mistakes that make briefs harder to work with
Most weak briefs have good intentions; they just put the emphasis in the wrong place.
Some focus almost entirely on visual adjectives—clean, modern, minimal, premium—without describing what the site actually needs to do for the business. Others include long lists of micro-features copied from other sites, regardless of whether your audience truly needs them.
A subtle but important mistake is mixing must-haves and nice-to-haves without any prioritisation. If everything is equally important on paper, it is easy to underestimate the real scope and end up with a timeline and budget that only fits a much smaller project.
Another is skipping real-world metrics entirely. If you never mention how many leads you currently get from the site, what an average project is worth, or how many people are involved in approvals, it becomes harder to judge what kind of solution makes sense for you.
You do not need to fix all of this in the first draft. Even a short paragraph stating “These are the parts that absolutely must be in scope for launch; these are the parts we are okay to move to a second phase” can make a brief dramatically easier to estimate.
Turning your next brief into a better conversation
The real value of a strong website project brief is not the document itself. It is the quality of the conversations it unlocks.
When you share a clear, honest brief with a solo design agency or specialist, you very quickly find out whether the project is a good fit for both sides. Questions become sharper. Proposals focus on trade-offs instead of generic feature lists. Timelines feel less like optimistic guesses and more like the result of shared constraints.
If you want a practical way to start, you can use the existing project brief on your site as a checklist and then expand your answers into a document you are comfortable sharing more broadly. Pair that with the hiring guidance from the article on how to hire web developers as a business leader, and your next round of conversations is likely to be calmer, shorter, and much more productive than the last one.
