How to write a website design brief agencies can quote on

A good website design brief does not describe the website. It describes the problem, the people the site is for, and the limits the work has to fit inside. Get those three right and every agency you send it to can quote on the same job. Get them wrong and you will receive five proposals for five different projects, priced in ways you cannot compare. We read a lot of briefs before starting brand website projects, and the useful ones are rarely the longest. Below is what we look for, what to leave out, and a checklist you can copy.

01What a website design brief is for

A brief has one job: to let someone outside your company understand the project well enough to propose a sensible approach, a timeline and a price. It is not a specification. Nobody can write a full specification before the research is done, and a brief that tries to usually locks in guesses as requirements.

Think of it as the start of a conversation. The agency should come back with questions, and the quality of those questions tells you a lot about them.

02What to put in a website design brief

These are the sections that change how we would plan and price a project. Each one can be a few sentences. A brief that covers all of them on two or three pages is better than a 30 page document that buries them.

The business problem

Start with why now. "The site is old" is a symptom. "Sales says prospects arrive confused about what we do since we added a second product" is a problem someone can solve. Name what is not working, and how you know.

Who the site is for

List the two or three audiences that matter most, in order, and what each needs to do or decide on the site. A buyer comparing suppliers, a candidate checking the culture and an existing customer looking for support all need different things. If you have to choose, say which one wins.

What success looks like

Pick a small number of measures you already track or can start tracking: qualified enquiries, demo requests, trial sign ups, applications. Include today's figure if you have it. Avoid vanity targets like "more traffic" unless traffic is genuinely the goal.

What exists today

Tell the agency what they are inheriting:

• The current platform and who hosts it
• Roughly how many pages, and which ones bring in most visits or leads
• Brand guidelines, a design system or a component library, if there is one
• Integrations that must keep working: CRM, marketing automation, analytics, booking tools

If the current site ranks well for anything, say so. Changing platforms or URLs without a plan is the quickest way to lose that, which is why we keep a separate SEO checklist for website migrations.

Content

Say who will write and supply the content, and how ready it is. This is the line item most often underestimated. An agency will plan very differently for "we have new copy for every page" than for "we hope to reuse most of what is there".

Who maintains it afterwards

Who will edit the site once it launches, and how often? A marketing team publishing weekly needs a different CMS and a different set of components from a site that changes twice a year. If brand consistency already slips between pages, read our note on design systems versus style guides before you decide what to ask for.

Constraints and must haves

The non negotiables: a platform you are tied to, languages, legal or compliance review, accessibility requirements, a launch date that cannot move and why. For accessibility, naming a target such as level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 is clearer than "it should be accessible".

Budget and timeline

Give a budget range. We know this feels like showing your hand. In practice, a range is the single most useful line in a brief, because the same goal can be met with a lean build or a large one, and without a range every agency guesses. The guess decides the proposal more than your requirements do.

For the timeline, give the date you need to launch and anything fixed around it, like an event or a funding round. Tell agencies when you plan to decide, too.

How you will choose

Say who signs off, how many agencies you are talking to and what the selection looks like. This is not a formality. It tells the agency how much work to put into a response, and it saves everyone a round of chasing.

If you have not settled on what kind of partner to brief, decide that first, because each one reads a brief differently. A freelancer needs you to plan and manage the project; we set out the trade offs in hiring on Upwork or working with a studio. A creative subscription is built for a flow of campaign work rather than one site; see how Superside compares with a website team.

03What to leave out of the brief

Some things feel helpful but narrow the answers you get:

• Page by page designs or wireframes. Unless they come from research you trust, they fix the solution before anyone has questioned it.
• A long list of sites you like. Two or three references with a sentence on what you like about each are useful. Twenty screenshots are not.
• Features without a reason. "We need a resources hub" is a feature. "Prospects ask for case studies in every sales call and we cannot find them" is the reason, and it may have a better answer.
• Every stakeholder's wish list. Merge them, rank them, and keep the top of the list.

04A website design brief checklist you can copy

Paste this into a document and answer each line in a sentence or two. If you cannot answer one, write that down too; it is a question for the first call.

• Why this project, why now, and how you know what is not working
• Primary and secondary audiences, ranked, with what each needs to do
• Two to four measures of success, with today's figures if you have them
• Current platform, hosting, page count and the pages that matter most
• Pages or topics that rank in search and must keep their traffic
• Brand guidelines, design system or component library, and how up to date they are
• Integrations that must keep working
• Who writes and supplies content, and how ready it is
• Who edits the site after launch, and how often
• Constraints: platform, languages, legal review, accessibility target
• Budget range
• Launch date, fixed dates around it, and when you will choose a partner
• Decision makers and how the selection will run
• Two or three reference sites, with what you like about each

05What happens after you send it

Expect questions back. A good partner will want to talk before quoting, because a brief written before any research has gaps nobody can see from the inside. Be wary of a detailed fixed price returned within a day without a single question; it is priced on assumptions you have not seen.

On our side, an intro call comes first, then a short proposal with our understanding of the project, the approach and a realistic budget range. If we go ahead, the work starts with a fixed fee discovery phase: interviews with your team and a few customers, an audit of your analytics, content and search performance, and at the end a proper brief, a sitemap and a fixed price for design and build. You keep that brief whoever builds the site. Our process page walks through each phase.

That second brief is usually much sharper than the first, and that is the point. Yours does not need to be perfect. It needs to be honest about the problem, the audience and the limits.

06When the brief says "redesign" but the problem is smaller

Writing the brief is a good moment to check that you need a new site at all. Sometimes the honest answer to "why now" is a handful of slow templates, a CMS the team avoids, or a positioning change that only needs new copy. We wrote about telling the difference in how often you should redesign your website.

If you would like a second opinion on a brief before it goes out, send it to us. We will tell you what we would ask, even if we are not the right fit for the work.