A website brief: what belongs inside
A good brief is not a stack of pages but a list of decisions made before the work starts. What belongs in it — and what does not.
A brief is written so that you do not argue later. Its quality is measured not in pages but in the number of questions it answers in advance. Forty pages without an answer to "who writes the copy" are worse than four pages with one.
1. The goal, not a description of a site
The first paragraph says what should change after launch. "We need a modern site" is not a goal. "Enquiries only come from referrals, we want them from search" is a goal you can check the result against.
2. Who comes and what they need
- Two or three kinds of visitor in words, not "target audience 25–45"
- What each wants to find in the first thirty seconds
- What they are doing when they open the site: searching, comparing, verifying
3. Structure
A list of pages with one line of purpose each, plus what is on the homepage and in what order. An argument about structure that is not finished in the brief returns during the build, where it costs three times more.
4. Content: who and when
The line "the client provides the copy" with no date is the single largest source of missed deadlines in our practice.
Write an owner and a date for each kind of content: copy, photography, logos, translations, legal documents.
5. Integrations
- What goes into the CRM and in what shape
- How payment is taken and what the person sees afterwards
- What analytics are needed and which events count
- Mail: which address sends, and who reads the replies
6. Acceptance
The most skipped section. Describe how the work is judged done: which screens, which browsers, what "works on a phone" means, how many seconds of loading is acceptable. Without it, acceptance becomes an exchange of opinions.
What does not belong
- Technical solutions if you are not the developer: "build it in React" is a constraint with a price, not a goal
- Wishes like "make it look expensive" with no references
- Points you have no intention of checking
Last thing: a brief is a living document. A change mid-project is normal; a change agreed verbally and written down nowhere is not.
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