website brief does not need to prescribe a technology stack or arrive as a fifty-page specification. It needs to give capable suppliers enough context to understand the business problem, identify unknowns and price the same broad result. The best briefs are specific about evidence and constraints while leaving room for the delivery team to recommend how the outcome should be achieved.
Explain what the organisation does, why the work is happening now and what has been tried already. Include the current website, relevant analytics or customer evidence, business deadlines and the people responsible for decisions. “We need a modern website” gives no basis for prioritising; “qualified enquiries have fallen while mobile abandonment increased” creates a testable problem.
- Who arrives, and what question or task brought them?
- What do they know before visiting and what must they trust?
- Which action matters to them and which action matters to the business?
- What prevents completion today?
- Are there language, accessibility, device or location needs that change the experience?
List existing pages, documents, media and data sources, then say what must be retained, rewritten, migrated or removed. Functionality should describe behaviour: account access, search, booking, payments, calculators, routed forms or integrations. Include the systems involved and who owns access. A supplier cannot price an integration responsibly from the word “CRM”.
- Budget range or approval ceiling, if one exists.
- Required launch event and whether the date is fixed or preferred.
- Legal, regulatory, security, procurement and brand constraints.
- Internal owners for copy, assets, data, review and final approval.
- Existing domains, hosting, analytics, CMS, repositories and supplier contracts.
Request scope, exclusions, assumptions, milestones, payment schedule, team, testing, ownership, launch, warranty and ongoing cost. Ask which risks need discovery before a firm estimate. You do not need suppliers to use the same solution, but you do need enough common structure to understand why two prices differ.
Choose a small set of outcomes the website can influence: qualified enquiries, completed applications, support deflection, task completion, content publishing time or revenue at an appropriate margin. Record a baseline where possible. Traffic alone is not success if the wrong people arrive or nobody completes the valuable action.
Astrongbriefreducesguessingwithoutpretendingtheclientalreadyknowstheanswer.