How to write a website brief an agency can quote from

A website brief is the document you send to agencies or freelancers before they quote. It says what your business does, what the new site has to achieve, who it is for, what it must contain and what you can spend. It does not need to be long or technical: two or three pages written in plain language are enough. What it needs is to answer the questions every supplier will otherwise answer with their own assumptions, because those assumptions are where quotes for “the same website” end up thousands of euros apart. This guide gives you the sections, a template you can copy, and a real example, the brief behind the site you are reading.

What a brief is, and what it is not

A brief describes the problem and the constraints; the agency’s proposal describes the solution. That division matters. You know your business, your customers and your budget better than anyone, so those belong in the brief. Which platform to use, how many templates the design needs, or how to structure the database is what you are paying the agency to work out. A brief that prescribes the technology often gets quotes for the wrong project done well.

German project practice has precise words for the two halves. The Lastenheft is the client’s document: everything the client requires of the work. The Pflichtenheft is the supplier’s answer, saying how it will meet those requirements. The definitions come from the German project management standard DIN 69901-5, and the split works the same in any language.

Why the brief decides the price

When two quotes for the same brief are far apart, the brief usually left room for two different projects. One agency read “an online shop” as a hosted store with a standard theme, the other as a custom build with an ERP connection. Neither is wrong; they are pricing different things. The ranges and cost drivers in our guide to what a website costs are mostly the questions a good brief answers in advance.

Unclear requirements are expensive for the whole project, not only the quote. In PMI’s research on requirements management, 47% of unsuccessful projects failed to meet their goals because of inaccurate requirements. A page of clear answers before the first meeting is the cheapest fix there is.

Start with the goal, not the pages

Write the goal first, as one sentence that can be measured: more enquiries from a particular kind of customer, online orders replacing phone orders, fewer support calls, recruiting. Everything else in the brief serves that sentence, and it is what an agency should design around. “A modern website” is not a goal; it is a description of what you have now, minus the parts you dislike.

Then describe the people the site is for: who they are, what they come to find, what convinces them, and whether they arrive on a phone or a laptop. Two lines per audience is enough. If you have analytics from the current site, say what share of visitors use mobile; it changes the design brief more than any colour preference.

Pages, features and content

List the pages you expect, even roughly: home, services, one page per service, about, contact. Then list the features separately, because features are where effort hides. A contact form is a small job; a quote calculator, a booking system, a member area or a second language each changes the project. Say which ones are essential for launch and which can come later.

Be honest about content. Say who writes the text, who supplies photos and whether they exist yet. Content arriving late is one of the most common reasons website projects overrun, as our guide to how long a website project takes explains, and an agency that knows it is writing the copy will price and plan for it.

Integrations and the site you already have

Name every system the site must talk to: the CRM that receives enquiries, the payment provider, the invoicing software, the newsletter tool, the booking calendar, the stock system. Each one is a piece of work with its own risks, and it is the part of a quote that varies the most between suppliers. If you do not know whether something is needed, list it as a question.

If a site already exists, give its address and say what must survive: pages that bring in enquiries, addresses that other sites link to, and any search traffic it earns. A redesign that changes addresses without redirects can lose that traffic overnight; redesigning without losing SEO covers what to ask for.

Design: show, do not describe

Words like “clean”, “modern” and “premium” mean something different to everyone who reads them. Links do not. List three to five sites you like and say what you like about each, the navigation of one, the photography of another, then one or two you dislike and why. Say which brand assets exist: logo files, colours, fonts, photography. If there is no real brand yet, logo vs brand identity explains what is worth deciding first, and why designs come before development explains what you should expect to approve before anything is built.

Budget and timeline: give a range

Give a budget range. Without one, every agency guesses what you can spend and designs to its guess, so one proposal is a template site and the next is a custom platform, and you cannot compare them. A range such as €4,000 to €6,000 lets each supplier tell you what fits inside it, and it does not weaken your negotiating position; it saves everyone a round of proposals for a project you were never going to buy. Our price guide shows what agencies typically charge for each kind of site.

Give the launch date and say why it matters. A trade fair, a product launch or the end of a contract with the current host is a fixed date, and the plan will be built backwards from it. “As soon as possible” is not a date; it tells the agency nothing about what it can trade off.

A real example: the brief behind this website

Our own site would have been briefed like this. The business: a web design and development agency in Bucharest, working for clients in Germany, Romania and further afield. The goal: enquiries from small and mid-sized businesses, measured as contact form submissions. The audience: business owners and marketing managers, reading in English, German or Romanian. The features: the same site in three languages on three domains, levelui.com, levelui.de and levelui.ro, fixed prices published for every package, a library of guides, and a client portal and an admin panel inside the same application. Content: written by us, in all three languages, never translated word for word.

Each of those lines changes the quote. Three languages on three domains is three sets of content and three search presences, not one site with a language switch. Published prices mean the price pages are part of the build. A client portal means logins, permissions and data, which is software rather than web design. Written down at the start, none of that is a surprise to anyone.

Sending it out

Send the same brief to three or four suppliers, and invite questions before they quote. The questions you get back are the first real test of each agency: the good ones will ask about the goal, the integrations and the content, and will tell you where your brief is unclear. Our guide to choosing a web design agency covers how to compare the proposals that come back.

If you would rather think the brief through with someone first, our Strategy Session is a two-hour video workshop built around your brief, and you leave with a written summary and a decision log you can send to anyone, including other agencies.

Sources

The template is our own. The two external references cover the cost of unclear requirements and the standard German definitions of the client’s and supplier’s documents.

• PMI — Requirements Management: A Core Competency for Project and Program Success ↗

  Pulse of the Profession in-depth report: 47% of unsuccessful projects failed to meet their goals because of inaccurate requirements management.

• Wikipedia (German) — Lastenheft ↗

  The client’s requirements document as defined in DIN 69901-5, and how it differs from the supplier’s Pflichtenheft.