How to Write a Website Brief That Gets Great Results

The Document That Makes Everything Else Easier

A website brief is the document you give a web designer or agency at the start of a project that defines what you need, who it's for, and what success looks like. Done well, it's the foundation that makes the entire project faster, cheaper, and more likely to produce exactly what you need. Done poorly — or not done at all — it creates the conditions for misaligned expectations, expensive revisions, and deliverables that don't match what you had in mind.

The correlation between brief quality and project quality is strong enough that most experienced agencies evaluate clients partially by the quality of their briefs. A client who has thought carefully about their needs and documented them clearly is more likely to provide good feedback, approve designs efficiently, and end up satisfied with the result. A client with no brief and unclear requirements is a risk — for both sides.

This guide covers every element of a strong website brief: what to include, how to be specific rather than vague, and how this document protects your investment and your project.

The Core Elements of a Website Brief

1. Business Background

Help the designer understand your business before they design anything. Include:

• What your business does (in plain language — don't assume industry knowledge)
• How long you've been in business and your stage of growth
• What makes you different from competitors (your actual differentiator, not generic claims)
• Your business model (how you make money)
• Your geographical reach (local, national, global)

The designer needs this context to make appropriate visual and structural decisions. A website for a scrappy two-person startup and a website for a 15-year established professional services firm should feel different — the brief provides the context that guides these decisions.

2. Project Goals

The most important section — and the one most often written vaguely. Your goals should be specific and measurable:

Vague: "We want a website that looks professional and helps us grow."

Specific: "Primary goal: increase qualified leads from the website from 5/month to 15/month within 6 months of launch. Secondary goal: reduce the number of 'what do you actually do?' questions in initial sales calls by making our service offering clearer on the website."

Specific goals change the design brief from "make something nice" to "solve this specific business problem." They also give you clear criteria for evaluating the finished product — does it accomplish the goal?

3. Target Audience

Describe exactly who this website needs to serve. Not "businesses" or "homeowners" — specific enough that the designer could picture the person:

• Industry, company size, and role (for B2B)
• Demographics, location, and life stage (for B2C)
• Their primary problems or desires related to your service
• Their biggest concerns or objections when considering your service
• Their technical sophistication (affects language, design complexity, and assumed knowledge)
• What they're doing right before they visit your website

Include secondary audiences if relevant — hiring managers who look at the About/Careers page, referral partners who evaluate expertise, media and press who look for company information. The primary audience drives the main design; secondary audiences need to be served without compromising the primary experience.

4. Project Scope

Define exactly what's included in this project. List every page that needs to exist on the new site:

Example scope:

• Homepage
• Services overview page
• Individual service pages (x3: [Service A], [Service B], [Service C])
• About page (team profiles for 4 people)
• Case studies section (4 case studies)
• Blog (landing page only — posts added by client)
• Contact page with inquiry form
• Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

The scope list prevents "I thought that was included" scope creep disputes later. If a page isn't in the scope, it's either out of scope or needs to be added with an explicit change order and budget adjustment.

5. Functionality Requirements

List every piece of functionality the site needs beyond displaying information:

• Contact form (how many fields? where does it send? any auto-responder needed?)
• Online booking system (which provider? what needs to integrate?)
• E-commerce (which platform? approximate product count? what payment methods?)
• Client portal or member area
• Video integration (hosted where?)
• Social media feeds
• Live chat
• Newsletter subscription integration (which email platform?)
• Map embed
• Multi-language support

Be specific about what each functionality needs to do and what existing systems it needs to connect to. "Contact form" is underspecified. "HubSpot-integrated contact form that captures name, email, phone, project type, and budget range, and creates a deal in HubSpot CRM with each submission" is a real requirement.

6. Design Direction

Give the designer aesthetic guidance without designing for them. The most effective approaches:

Visual references: 3–5 websites you like with specific notes on what you like about each one. "I like the clean, spacious layout of Company X's homepage" is more useful than "make it modern and clean." Even more useful: note what you DON'T like about each reference — "I like the typography on this site but not the dark background."

Brand assets: Provide your logo (in SVG or high-resolution PNG), current brand guidelines if they exist, approved color codes (HEX), and any typefaces your brand already uses.

Mood descriptors: Adjectives that describe how the site should feel: "professional but approachable, not corporate," "premium but not intimidating," "technical but understandable to non-experts." These guide visual tone decisions.

Explicit exclusions: Things you don't want: "no stock photography of generic business people," "not overly trendy — needs to look professional in 5 years," "no dark backgrounds — we want a clean, light feel."

7. Content Plan

Specify what content exists and what needs to be created:

• What page copy exists (and needs editing) vs. what needs to be written from scratch
• Who will write the copy (client, hired copywriter, designer?)
• What photography exists vs. what needs to be taken or purchased
• Whether professional copywriting is in scope or the client provides all written content
• Timeline for content delivery (when will all content be ready for the designer?)

The content plan is often the section most businesses skip or underspecify. It's also the source of the most common project delays. Designers cannot design effectively without knowing what content goes where. Being explicit about content responsibility and timeline prevents the "we're waiting for your content" email that pushes launch dates back by weeks.

8. Competitive Landscape

List 3–5 competitor websites with brief notes on what they do well and what they do poorly. This helps the designer understand the visual context the site will exist in — what conventions exist in the category, where there's differentiation opportunity, and what the quality bar looks like from the visitor's perspective.

9. Technical Requirements

Document technical constraints and requirements:

• Platform preference or requirement (WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, other)
• Hosting requirements (existing hosting to use, performance requirements)
• Existing domain(s) and whether URLs from the current site need to be preserved
• Analytics requirements (which platforms, what events to track)
• Accessibility requirements (WCAG level)
• Browser/device support requirements
• Any compliance requirements (HIPAA, PCI, GDPR)

10. Budget and Timeline

Be explicit about both:

Budget: Provide a range. Designers and agencies calibrate their proposals to budget — a realistic budget range gets you realistic proposals. "We don't have a budget" or "as low as possible" produces proposals that either can't be delivered at those constraints or are padded to cover uncertainty. A specific range like "$8,000–$12,000" gets you proposals actually sized for your project.

Timeline: What's the target launch date and why? Are there hard deadlines (a product launch event, a conference, a marketing campaign) that make the date non-negotiable? Are there soft preferences? The agency needs this to assess feasibility and resource their schedule accordingly.

What Makes a Brief Excellent vs. Adequate

An adequate brief covers the basics: scope, goals, timeline, budget. An excellent brief goes further:

Provides specific success metrics, not just goals: not "generate more leads" but "increase form submissions by 40%"

Includes actual customer language, not company vocabulary: what words do your customers use to describe their problems?

Documents assumptions explicitly: "We're assuming all content will be provided by [date]. If this slips, we understand the timeline will need to adjust."

Notes known constraints: "Our brand guidelines are strict — the logo cannot be modified and these two brand colors must appear on every page."

Identifies the single decision-maker: "All design approvals will be made by [name], Marketing Director. Her sign-off is final — no need to loop in additional stakeholders."

The Bottom Line

A strong website brief is the highest-ROI time investment in any web design project. It produces better designs (because the designer has the context to make informed decisions), fewer revision rounds (because expectations are clear upfront), faster delivery (because scope is defined and content is planned), and a website that actually accomplishes your goals (because those goals were articulated clearly at the start).

The time it takes to write a thorough brief — typically 2–4 hours for a business that knows itself well — is returned many times over in the time saved during the project itself.

At Scalify, our kickoff questionnaire covers the essential brief elements in a structured format — we've learned exactly what information we need to deliver a great website in 10 days, and we make it easy to provide it.