The brief that gets you a better website

A good brief is not a specification. You are not expected to know what the pages should be — that is the job you are hiring for. A good brief tells the agency what success looks like so they can propose the pages themselves.

1. What has to change

“We need a new website” is a solution. “Sales spend the first ten minutes of every call explaining what we do” is a problem, and a much better starting point. Lead with the problem.

2. Who you are trying to convince

Not a demographic — a person with a job and a reason to be sceptical. “Operations managers at mid-size manufacturers who have been burned by a bad software rollout” tells a designer more than three paragraphs about your market.

3. What you already have

Brand guidelines, photography, copy, a CRM you cannot move off. Be honest about what exists versus what someone once made a start on. This is the biggest driver of both timeline and price.

4. Sites you admire, and why

The why is the valuable half. “I like linear.app because it feels calm” is useful. A list of five URLs with no commentary means the designer has to guess which quality you were pointing at — and they will guess wrong at least once.

5. Your actual constraints

• A real deadline, and what happens if it slips.
• A real budget range. Withholding it does not get you a better price, it gets you proposals you cannot act on.
• Who has to approve, and how many of them there are.

6. What you do not want

Often the most useful section. Carousels you hate, a competitor you do not want to resemble, a stock-photo style that makes you wince. Ruling things out early saves a whole revision round.

Our brief form asks for exactly these six things and takes about five minutes. It replaces the two discovery calls most agencies start with.

You can start one here — and if it turns out we are the wrong fit, we will say so and point you somewhere better.