How to write a website brief that gets you a useful quote

You do not need technical words for any of it. If you can describe your business to a new employee, you can write a brief.

Say you run a commercial cleaning company that looks after offices and clinics in one city. Your site is six years old. You send this to three studios:

“We need a new modern, mobile-friendly website with a good look. Please quote.”

Three quotes come back. One is a five-page template site. One includes a quote calculator you never asked for. One does not mention what happens to the pages that bring in your current enquiries. You cannot compare them, because each studio answered a different, invisible question.

Now imagine you sent this instead:

“We clean offices and medical clinics in the city and its suburbs. Most enquiries come by phone and through one form. We want more enquiries from clinics, which pay better and renew more often, and fewer from one-off home cleans we do not offer. Our current site has a page for each service, and the clinic page brings in most of our search visits. We need a new site that explains the clinic service properly, shows our service area, and lets a manager request a site visit in under a minute. We write our own text but have no photos. We would like to launch before the new financial year. Our budget range is set, and I will share it on a call. Two people decide: me and the operations manager.”

The company is hypothetical, and the contrast is the point. The second brief is about 130 words. It already lets a studio ask good questions, propose the right scope and price it against the same facts as everyone else.

A brief describes your situation and the outcome you want. It is not a specification, and it is not a design. A specification says how every part will work; a design says how it will look. Both come later and are better done with the studio, after it has learned more about your business than a document can hold.

The UK government's guidance on writing requirements for digital projects, written for buyers who must hire outside suppliers, makes the same split. It asks buyers to explain the problem they want to solve, to describe who the users are and what they need to do, to describe the budget, and to detail any work already done. It also warns that long detailed briefs can be hard to understand and respond to, and tells buyers to avoid jargon and in-house terminology, or to explain it.

This guide has a different job from our guide on what to prepare and what to ask before you hire a web designer. That one is about judging studios: the questions you ask them. This one is about the document you send them.

Use these headings, in this order. Each one answers a question a studio would otherwise have to ask you before it could quote.

Two or three sentences on what the business does, for whom and where. Then the outcomes: one to three things the site must make happen. “More enquiries from clinics” is an outcome. “A modern look” is a wish.

Say how you will know it worked, even roughly. “Clinic enquiries up compared with last year” is enough to start with, and it tells the studio what the site must measure. Our guide to what to measure on a business website helps if you are not sure.

List what you can observe, with examples: staff answer the same question every day, the site breaks on phones, nobody can edit it, a new service has no home. This is the part of the brief that lets a studio tell a rebuild from a repair.

If your evidence points to the content or the contact path rather than the design, a good studio will say so, and you will save money. Nielsen Norman Group, the usability research firm, puts the principle bluntly: never make radical changes when minimal adjustments will suffice, and let data about the real problem drive the choice. Our guide on why a website is not bringing in enquiries shows how to collect that evidence.

Name the two or three kinds of visitor who matter most and what each one needs before they will contact you. Use their questions, in their words, from your phone and inbox. If some visitors are not wanted (private homeowners, for the cleaning company), say so.

This matters most when you already have a site. Pages that earn visits need a plan before anything is replaced, as our guide to redesigning without losing search traffic explains. If you do not know which pages those are, say so; finding out is a legitimate first step in the project.

List the pages and functions you expect: a page for each service, a quote request form, a team page, bookings, a shop, a second language. Mark each as “must have” or “would like”. If you are unsure which pages a business of your kind needs, say that instead of guessing; our guide to what pages a business website needs can help.

Describe functions by what the visitor does (“a manager requests a site visit and picks a time”), not by the technology (“a custom plugin”). The studio knows the technology.

Content is the largest hidden difference between quotes. State what you have (text, photos, logo, brand colors, price lists, documents), what is out of date, and who will write or photograph what is missing. If you want the studio to write text, say so, and expect to give it time to interview you.

Two or three sites, each with the specific thing you like: how quickly you could find the price, the photography, the way a form felt. They can be in other industries. “I like it” is hard to act on, and “I could book in three taps” is easy.

Tell every studio what format you want in return, so the answers line up. Ask each to state:

If you send the same brief and the same list to each studio, the differences between quotes become the information you need.

As long as it takes to answer the nine headings and no longer. For a small business site, that is often one to three pages. A shop with integrations or several languages may need more, and the extra length should be lists of facts, such as page inventories and system names, rather than prose. A brief that runs to twenty pages usually mixes a specification into a request for a quote, and that makes responding harder.

Only if you have a real reason. You might already run a Shopify store, or your accountant's system requires a particular connection. In that case say so, and why. Otherwise describe the problem and let the studio propose the approach, because a brief that prescribes the solution stops you from hearing a better one. For a sense of the tradeoffs, read our guide to custom-coded, Shopify or a website builder.

The same goes for design. Share what you like and why. Leave the layout to the person whose job it is.

Paste this into a document, replace the prompts with your own answers, and delete any heading that does not apply.

When your brief is ready, send it to two or three studios and compare the answers against the questions in what to prepare and what to ask before you hire a web designer. If you would like to send it to us, you can discuss your project; you do not need a technical brief to start, and a rough draft of the nine headings is plenty. Our approach page shows what happens after the brief. Once quotes arrive, what affects the cost of a website explains why they differ, and the rest of the Learn library covers the decisions around it.

1. GOV.UK, Digital Outcomes and Specialists, “How to write your requirements” (problem, users, budget, work already done; long briefs hard to respond to; avoid jargon): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-write-your-requirements-for-digital-outcomes-and-specialists-services (page since withdrawn)

2. Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, “Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?” (2015)