The website brief template (and what it won’t tell you)

A template is the easy part

You can get a website brief template in thirty seconds. That’s not where briefs go wrong.

Ask ChatGPT and you’ll get objectives, audience, features, timeline and budget, neatly laid out. Fill it in and it looks complete.

Then the quotes come back and you can’t compare them. One agency priced twelve pages and another forty. One included the copy and one didn’t. Everyone filled the gaps with a guess, and every guess was different.

The problem isn’t the headings. It’s what’s missing from under them, and you can’t spot a gap you don’t know is there. AI is brilliant at the obvious. A brief is mostly the things that aren’t.

What briefs usually leave out

These come up in almost every first conversation we have about a new website. None of them are on a standard template.

• What counts as working. “A better website” isn’t a goal. If you can’t name the number you’ll count in a year, nobody can design for it, and you won’t know whether it worked.
• The pages already earning. Some of your current pages bring in search traffic you’d miss. Move them without mapping every URL and the rankings you’ve built go with them.
• Who writes the words. If the answer is “we’ll do it as we go”, that’s the line most likely to make the project run over. There’s more in why website projects run over.
• Who can say no. The person who sees the site for the first time in month three is the person who changes the homepage. If they haven’t read the brief, it isn’t agreed yet.
• Who you’d let go. Every audience feels important. A site built for all of them equally isn’t built for any of them. Someone has to decide the order.
• What it has to connect to. The CRM, the booking system, the spreadsheet someone updates every Monday. Leave these out and they turn up halfway through, with a price attached.
• What happens after launch. Who updates it, how you’ll track what it brings in, and who looks after it. Launch day is when you find out if you were right, so plan how you’ll see it.
• Whether the story is agreed. If your leadership team would describe the business three different ways, the website will too. That’s a brand problem, not a website problem, and it needs settling first.

Why you can’t see them from the inside

Most teams brief a website once every five years. The gaps only look obvious once someone points at them.

Your team knows the business inside out, which is exactly why some questions never come up. Everyone assumes the goal is shared, the audiences are agreed and someone else is writing the copy. It’s nobody’s fault. You don’t know what you don’t know.

An agency will find the gaps eventually. The question is whether that happens before the quote, or in the middle of the project when every change costs time and money.

A quick check before you brief anyone

Answer these honestly. “Not sure” counts as no.

How we help you work it out

You don’t need a finished brief to talk to us. Working out what goes in it is part of what we do.

• Send us what you’ve got. A draft, a half-filled template or a page of notes. We’ll tell you what’s missing before it goes to anyone, including us. Get in touch.
• Work it out in a day. Our strategy workshop puts everyone who could overturn the website in one room and settles who it’s for, what it has to say and what success looks like. You leave with the decisions the brief is built on. From £2,800 + VAT.
• Start with no brief at all. Every web design project we run starts by untangling what’s there and agreeing what each page has to do. If those answers don’t exist yet, finding them is the first part of the job.

One business came to us merging four websites into one, with a brief ready to go to the agency it already worked with. Before it went, they wanted to test it. We suggested working through it in a workshop first, so the brief they took back was planned out properly, not filled in.

The website brief template

Free, editable, no email needed. Use it to write down what you’ve decided, so your web design brief says the same thing to every agency.

Eleven sections: the business, why you’re changing the site, goals and how you’ll measure them, audiences, competitors, your brand, content and copy, technical needs, sites you like, timeline and budget, and contacts and sign-off. Each has a short prompt and space for your answers, with the gaps above flagged where they belong.

Opens in Word, Google Docs or Pages. Five pages, free to use and share.

Before you send it, ask AI to question it rather than polish it. Paste this in with your draft:

Then send the same brief to every agency on your list, so they all quote for the same job.

Questions

What should a website brief include?

The business, why you’re changing the site, goals with a number attached, audiences in order, competitors, brand, content and who writes it, technical needs, sites you like, timeline, budget range and who signs it off. Most templates cover the headings. The value is in the answers.

Can’t we just use ChatGPT to write the brief?

For the writing, yes. It can’t tell you what your team hasn’t decided, or get everyone to agree, and those are the parts agencies price.

Do we need a brief before we talk to an agency?

No. A good agency will help you work out what goes in it. If one quotes without asking hard questions, it’s quoting for what you asked for, not for what will work.

Should we put a budget in the brief?

Yes, as a range. Without one, every agency guesses at the scope and you get quotes you can’t compare.

What if we can’t agree on the answers?

Then that’s the first job, before any agency. A strategy workshop settles it in a day.