How to Write a Great Website Brief

Andonette Wilkinson December 10, 2025

Insights

Ever asked for a quote and been astonished by the price variation? Or are you a small agency crying over scope creep? You need to sort out your brief! And I’m not saying this from a place of judgement; I’ve definitely lost sleep over projects that went sideways.

A detailed website brief is the foundation of any good web project. It gives your agency the context, goals and constraints they need to design something that works for your business.

In this guide, I’ll walk through what to include in a website brief, the questions to answer before you speak to an agency, and how to use a brief to get realistic quotes and better outcomes. you get like-for-like quotations and can help you manage expectations in terms of your budget.

Starting With The Brief

A good agency will always work with you to shape a detailed brief before any design work starts. The better your brief, the easier it is to compare proposals, set a realistic budget and avoid painful surprises later.

Websites are a serious investment for most organisations, and the scope can vary wildly. One agency might quote £5k and another £25k for what appears to be the same project, purely because their assumptions differ. A written brief reduces that gap.

When writing a brief for website design, follow our checklist to ensure you get everything you need to get your project off on the right foot. Without further ado, here is our website brief checklist!

1. The Brief Summary

Do you have a starting point? Before you pick up the phone to discuss your website project, it is good to have the following information to hand.

One primary goal and success metric for the new website (for example: “Increase qualified enquiries by 30% within 12 months.”)
Give us five words to describe your company.
Tell us your USP. What makes you different? Why would your customer choose you and not the competition?
List your company values.
Do you have brand collateral, such as stationery, signage, and documents?
Style guide: Typeface and colour preferences or dislikes.
Websites for inspiration. Provide links & say what design elements you like for each.

2. About You

When creating a website design brief, Web Design Agencies will want to know more details about your company and its background. Include the following:

Name, web address, what you do. (keep it short)
How long have you been trading?
Where are you based, and where do you operate? Do you plan on changing this?
A brief history. What has changed over the duration of your history?
How many staff do you employ?
Budget range for the project.
Short-term goals. For example, we want to increase our sales by 25% annually for the next three years. Use SMART goals

3. Project Aims

Make sure your chosen agency is asking the right questions. If not, they may lack the proper experience to handle your project. Don’t forget to tell your agency:

Why do you want a website? Be specific and short. For example, “I want to reach a broader market by selling our unique product online. A product like Oxford Safety covers is used primarily by the housing industry.
Do you have a specific goal in mind, such as increasing bookings for your safety training courses by 50% in the next year?
How will you measure success? Please share this info with your agency, as it can make all the difference to the project.

In 2026, it also helps to connect your aims directly to your analytics setup. Decide which events and conversions you’ll track in tools like Google Analytics 4 or your CRM, and make sure your agency knows which numbers matter most. If “more leads” is the aim, define how you will measure a lead and how you expect it to show up in your reports.

4. Budget

Website pricing is a minefield. It shouldn’t be. Making enquiries may result in wildly varying quotes, and no one wants to pay through the nose. Especially if you don’t get value for money.

Why one agency quotes you £5k and another £25k may seem a mystery to you, and yet one agency’s idea of a thorough and complete job may differ significantly from another.

Also, some agencies price based on perceived value, and others based on office location. Some price from vanity. None of these three metrics above has a bearing on your outcome.

We have included this high up on the list of priorities, as it is a critical factor in working with the right agency.

Some agencies won’t work on small projects, and some aren’t equipped to handle larger, more complex ones. Don’t be afraid to reveal your budget.

A brief and a budget will help you get like-for-like quotations, rather than just attracting agencies that may undercut prices but also services. It helps if you break this down. Here are some suggestions:

Budget for web design and development
Hosting
Ongoing support and maintenance.
Digital marketing.
Conversion rate optimisation and ongoing testing

If you can’t separate them just yet, don’t worry, but bear in mind you should budget for all of these things. You can’t leave any of these things out if you want a successful website.

For example, a site with no marketing whatsoever will have little to no traffic. It’s a surefire way to ensure your initial investment goes down the drain.

When you talk about budget, think beyond launch. Allow for ongoing optimisation, content, and technical upkeep. The site that performs best over time is usually the one with a small, consistent budget for improvements, not the one with a big build that never changes.

5. Time Frame

An agency needs to know if it can meet your deadlines. Deadlines are the responsibility of both parties.

Is your team on hand to ensure the project runs smoothly at your end? When we start a new project, we ask our clients to help us with the following:

An ideal start and finish date
Is there an absolute deadline? What will actually happen if you don’t meet it?

Deadlines are also your responsibility, so check what will happen with your agency if you don’t send them what THEY need on time.

Typically, our web projects take 2-3 months to complete if everything is on time. Smaller ones can take much less. Here’s what you can allow for.

Planning and finalising the brief for 2-3 weeks
Design phase 2-3 weeks
Development (building it) 3-4 weeks
Content population, revision and testing 2-3 weeks
Snagging and testing 2-3 weeks.

Complex builds, integrations or multi-stakeholder projects will usually take longer than these estimates, especially if content or decisions are delayed.

All these steps will take longer if we don’t get the info we need, so if it takes six months to finalise the brief, the rest of the work can’t reasonably be done in a couple of days.

6. Point of Contact

Let your agency know who the key point of contact is in your organisation and that they have the Let your agency know who the key point of contact is in your organisation, and that they have the necessary skills and decision-making power to move the project forward. Too many contacts can mean the project just doesn’t move along. The agency will want to know:

The key stakeholders in the project.
Who is the singular point of contact?
Who is responsible for providing content?
Which person signs off at each key stage?
Who will be updating the website when it’s done?

If you have a board, steering group or multiple departments involved, your point of contact should have enough authority to push decisions through, or you risk the project stalling.

7. Target Audience

A well-designed website should be designed with your customers in mind. We ask for the following information from our clients:

What sector do you work in?
Where are your customers?
Who is your existing customer base?
Do you have any web analytics the agency can review?
Do you want your customer base to remain the same, or are you looking to expand into new markets?
Who is your ideal customer?

Go a step further and outline your key user journeys. For example: “A procurement manager who needs to download a spec sheet and request a quote” or “A returning customer who wants to log in and reorder quickly.” These journeys shape structure, content and calls to action far better than generic “target audience” labels.

8. Competition

It is always good to know who else is operating in your sector, and how well (or not) they are doing so.

Tell us who you believe your main competitors are. At least 3.
You could also tell us who you want to compete with. For example, as an IT startup, you may not be on the radar of a well-established company, but you may want to get there.
For each competitor, provide their name and website.

Share where your competitors seem strong and where they fall short. For example, fast quoting, deeper resources, more transparent pricing, or better mobile experience. This helps your agency spot opportunities rather than just copying what already exists.

9. The Customer Journey: Call To Action

Why you think you need a website and what customers want out of a website can be completely different.

You may be really proud of all that running you do for your local charity, but as a company that sells bespoke fitted kitchens, is that what your customers want to see when they land on your site?

Getting this wrong can be the difference between that potential customer abandoning your site and finding one with better information.

So what action do you want your customer to take when they land on your site? Call you, buy something, subscribe to something?
Tell us what you want the customer to do. We once had a client who didn’t wish to email; he wanted customers to phone him. We need to know this!

Most effective websites have more than one meaningful action. A new visitor might read a guide and sign up for your mailing list. A warm prospect might book a demo or send a detailed enquiry. Map out primary and secondary calls to action so your agency can design pages that work for people at different stages of the decision process.

10. Your Existing Website

Do you have a website already? Most businesses that approach an agency for web development will usually have some form of digital presence but have outgrown it, and it may not address their current business goals. We ask our clients the following website brief questions:

When was your website built, and when was it last updated?
Do you use Google Analytics 4, a CRM, or any other analytics tools, and can you give your agency access?
Which pages or journeys convert best today, even if overall traffic is low?
Are you using any tools for user behaviour (for example, heatmaps or session replay), and have they revealed any obvious friction points?
How many visitors do you get, and how many sessions per month? An average over a year or so is helpful info.
What devices do people use most to access your site? For example, whilst most traffic is mobile, your particular industry may still be heavily desktop.
How many enquiries does your site generate monthly on average?
Are there any seasonal variations we should know about? For example, a luxury watch brand may see a massive spike around Christmas and others around times like Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
What do you like about your current site? What is working and what is absolutely critical, if anything, to keep? A site appearing at the top for a search term that generates 100 customers a month – we need to know this.
What do you dislike about your site? There’s a reason you want an update, overhaul, or redesign. This is obviously important to you and is niggling at you. Tell us.
Do you feel the website reflects your current brand well, or represents your business correctly and if not, why not?

The more we know about what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly, the better we can do at absolutely nailing a brief.

11. Your new website

So this is the most crucial bit, the bit any agency needs to nail. Here are the things you should consider.

What are the aims of this site? We mentioned this earlier, but include more detail here. The aims of the site could include things like
Increase online sales
Generate more enquiries
Attract new and skilled recruits.
Getting more relevant traffic to your website
Increase awareness and visibility of your website and brand.
To expand into new areas or markets

Your brief should outline any non-negotiable standards around search and usability. For example, whether you expect the site to meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines, pass Core Web Vitals for key templates, or follow a specific SEO strategy for priority pages. If you already have a sitemap, a list of target keywords, or a content plan, share it with your agency.

Considerations

What is the size of your new website? You can use an approximation, and your agency may also make suggestions.
What features do you want to include? For example, products, case studies, and galleries.
What’s the call to action? We asked this earlier under the section on what you want your customers to do.
Do you want users to download your cheat sheet, sign up for a mailing list, make a purchase, fill in a form or phone you?

E-Commerce

For an e-commerce website, please provide the approximate number of products you plan to sell and whether you will require us to add them.

Other features you may want to include in your website creative brief could be:

A content management system. (It’s unusual a site won’t have this nowadays)
Online bookings
Listings (could be jobs, properties, cars and so on)
Filters – will your customers need to filter this information?
Customer portal. Will your customers need to log in for any reason?
Blog section
Map
Contact forms
Any other type of forms
Mail signups
Member areas for specific content
Event calendars
Social media integration- do you have accounts set up, and will you require
that?
Forums
Careers listings

12. Content Management System

Most websites use a CMS. Some examples are WordPress, Umbraco, or more modern setups like Payload Sanity or Strapi. Some websites are entirely bespoke, meaning the CMS was built by the agency.

For more complex teams, it can help to define roles and workflow: who drafts content, who approves it, and who publishes it. Your choice of CMS should support that workflow, rather than forcing everything through a single login.

If you plan to keep the website up to date yourself, it’s a good idea to have someone in-house with the skills and resources to do so.

Although an agency can give you a login and complete control, you still need to know how to do this, or employ someone who does.

Remember. It’s not automatically your agency’s responsibility to coach you on how to update your website (unless you have paid them for a training package). If you are building a site with a CMS, your agency will need to know:

Will you manage all of it, or just be able to add and edit some of the more frequent information, whilst leaving the less frequent content for the agency to edit (most common)
Do you want to allow access to multiple users, and what kind of access do they need?
Do you need the CMS to integrate with any third-party systems or APIs (this can be critical in deciding what CMS is appropriate)? For example, an estate agent may want to integrate with Rightmove.
Would you need to link to a CRM or accounting software, e.g. Salesforce?
Does your website need to be translated into other languages? If so, do you have someone to translate them correctly?

If you already use other tools for content, marketing or product data, ask whether a more “headless” or API-driven approach makes sense. It is not right for every organisation, but for some, it keeps content in one place and pushes it out to multiple channels.

13. The Technical Stuff

We, as an agency, really don’t expect everyone to know all the technical requirements, but here are some basic things you will need to think about:

Do you have a domain name? Is it appropriate? (Example: jakescakes.com may not be helpful if you now do complete event planning)
What are your web hosting requirements? How business-critical are daily backups and uptime?
Is email hosting part of the project?
What payment gateways, if any, do we need to connect to? For example, PayPal, Stripe, Klarna and so on.
Are there any special accessibility requirements? Is it a website for people who need a specific level of accessibility, for example, the visually impaired?
Security expectations (SSL certificate, firewalls, regular updates, backups, uptime targets)
Performance expectations (use of a CDN, caching, image optimisation and Core Web Vitals targets)
Privacy and compliance (GDPR, data processing, cookie consent, privacy policy, and any sector-specific regulations)
Any existing systems the site must work with, such as CRMs, ERPs, booking platforms, or marketing automation tools.

14. Future Proofing

A website is an investment that needs to return on investment. A good agency will want to help you get maximum Return on your investment.

The more we can understand at the outset, the more you will get from your website down the line. Your agency will want to know:

Do we need to consider any future business plans now? For example, you may currently offer a bespoke service in which you process orders over the telephone, but you may wish to do so online at a later date.
Are there any things on your website you don’t have the budget for right now but would like to do later? For example, a customer portal.

When you talk about future plans, think about how flexible the site needs to be. Reusable content blocks and modular layouts make it easier to add new sections, campaigns or landing pages without redesigning everything from scratch.

15. Content

Content is still king. High-quality, relevant content is still what makes or breaks a website. Search engines and humans both pay attention to how clear, useful and trustworthy your pages are, far more than how often you publish.

Remember, your customers are completely in the dark unless you inform them. Your agency will need to know:

What do you already have? If you need a new website, then it is because something isn’t right about your existing one, so now is a really good time to think about your content. Remember, your agency can’t accurately quote you if you don’t have any content or you don’t know how much there will be.
Do you want an audit of the current content? Some of it might not align with your current business goals, or you may be found for the wrong keywords.
Who will write the new copy?
Do you have images, or are you happy to use stock images? Poor images will ruin the best-designed website. Hire a photographer, and either use stock or send high-quality, high-resolution images.
If there is downloadable material on your sites, such as PDFs, videos, or graphics, do you have it in full quality?

If you use any kind of automated writing tools, treat them as a drafting aid only. Your team or agency still needs to shape the final copy so it reflects your expertise, remains accurate, and aligns with your brand voice. Review and sign off on your brief.

As you can see, getting content right at the start is the best way to have a successful outcome.

16. Ongoing Maintenance

Every website needs maintenance; otherwise, it won’t function as intended. Browsers change, technology changes, and Content management systems update.

Who will be responsible for this, and do they have the necessary skills to do it?
What will need updating frequently? Ask for these parts to be editable. Content that doesn’t change or content that requires changes to the design would be best left with the agency.
How much input will you need from your agency?

Agree on who owns updates to plugins, themes and integrations, and whether you want a retainer with your agency for this. Security and compatibility issues quietly appear in the background and become costly when ignored.

17. Marketing Strategy

As an experienced PPC Agency in Manchester, we work mainly with established companies who are on their second or third website, so they know that traffic is earned and paid.

Your website only performs if people can find it and if you keep improving it. In 2026, that usually means a blend of SEO, paid media, email, social, and ongoing testing rather than relying on a single “hero channel.

So then, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just put a site online and have people start flocking to it. Also, don’t make the mistake of thinking that all you have to do is write a blog. You need a solid strategy.

Your website needs to work consistently with other marketing elements. Tell your web agency about any other campaigns you have going, online or offline.

Do you currently do any of the following? And what results are you getting? Do you know your current CPA or conversion rates? If this is to form an advertising brief, think about:

Online

SEO Google Search Engine Optimisation & Other Search Engines
PPC/Google Ads or Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn and others.
Social media. What platforms and how often do you post? What kind of content are you posting?
Email marketing: which service do you use? Will it need to be integrated?
How big is your mailing list? What results do you get from it?
How are you using your mailing list? Do you have any current funnels?
Content marketing
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and A/B testing
Remarketing and audience targeting
Marketing automation (nurture sequences, lead scoring)

Offline

Is the website part of a whole brand overhaul? Would you like the agency to help with this for consistency?
Any printed media, such as brochures, flyers, and so on.
Outdoor advertising.
Any PR Campaigns with PR companies.
Direct mail campaigns (Good old snail mail)
Vehicle wraps. How many, what, where?
Sponsorships
Merchandise
Affiliate advertising
Anything else? Telemarketing or other lead funnels.

Make sure your brief includes how you measure success across channels (e.g., cost per acquisition, lead quality, revenue from specific campaigns), so your agency can connect site performance to tangible business outcomes.

What Next?

Finally, don’t be a one-site stand. A successful website happens when you have a meaningful relationship with your agency. We want to help.

Be honest and frank, and you’ll get good results. Are you looking for help writing a paid media brief? Read Ben’s article on how he creates a digital marketing brief template. If you want our website brief template, just drop us a line.

Made By Factory is a boutique marketing agency in Manchester. We care about clear communication, honest advice and measurable results. If you want straight-talking partners who give a damn about your business, we’ll get on well.