A website brief is the cheapest way to get a better site. It is a short document that tells whoever you are hiring what you need and why, and it does two things at once: it makes your quotes comparable, and it forces you to decide what the site is actually for before anyone starts building it.
Most people skip it and send a sentence and a link to a site they like. That gets you quotes that answer different questions and a build that drifts. A page is enough to avoid both.
What to include
Keep it to the things that change the shape of the project:
- What the business does and who it is for, in a couple of plain sentences.
- The one thing the site has to achieve: enquiries, online sales, bookings, or looking credible to a particular client.
- The pages you think you need. A rough list is fine; a good builder will refine it.
- Two or three sites you like, and one line on what you like about each. "Clean" is less useful than "I like how obvious it is what they do".
- What you already have: logo, brand, photography, written content, or none of it.
- Timing, if there is a real deadline behind it.
- A rough budget range.
Why the budget line matters most
Sharing a budget feels like giving away your hand. It is the opposite. A website can be built for £1,500 or £15,000, and both are legitimate for different jobs. Without a range, a studio has to guess which one you mean, and the quotes you get back will be all over the place and impossible to compare. Give a range and you get a proposal designed to fit it, which is what you actually want. We wrote more on how to choose a web designer if you are weighing up who to send this to.
What you can leave out
You do not need to specify how the site is built. Whether it is WordPress, a custom build or something else is a decision for the builder to justify, not yours to dictate, and a brief full of technology names with no clear goal is harder to quote well, not easier. Say what you want it to do and let the people you are paying tell you how they would do it.
The short version. One page: what you do, who for, the single goal, the pages, a few examples with reasons, what you already have, and a budget range. That brief gets you comparable quotes and a site aimed at the right target.
When your brief is ready, you can send it to us and we will come back with a straight proposal.