Guides
What to put in a website brief so agencies can quote accurately: thirteen short sections, a template to copy and paste, a filled-in example and the mistakes that push prices up.
A website brief is a short document, usually two or three pages, that tells an agency what you need built, why, for whom, by when and for roughly how much. Write one before you ask for prices and the quotes that come back will be closer together, easier to compare and far less likely to grow later. Below is the website brief template we would be glad to receive with every enquiry, ready to copy and paste, followed by a filled-in example and the mistakes that push quotes up.
You do not need technical knowledge to write a good one. You need to be specific about your business and honest about your budget. The agency’s job is to turn that into pages, features and hours.
When an agency prices a website it is estimating hours. Every gap in what you have told them has to be filled with an assumption, and assumptions get priced in one of two ways. A cautious agency assumes the worst and adds a margin. An eager one assumes the best, quotes low, and raises the difference as “additional work” halfway through. That is how three agencies can quote £900, £4,000 and £14,000 for what you thought was the same job. They were quoting three different jobs.
A brief removes the guessing. These are the facts that move a quote the most.
| What the agency needs to know | Why it changes the price |
|---|---|
| How many pages, and how many different layouts | Ten pages on two layouts is far less work than ten pages that each look different |
| Who writes the words and supplies the photos | Copywriting and photography can cost as much as the build |
| What the site has to do beyond showing information | Bookings, payments, logins, calculators and uploads are each priced separately |
| Which other systems it must connect to | An integration can be two hours or eighty depending on the system |
| Whether there is an existing site to move | Content transfer and redirects are real hours, and skipping them costs rankings |
| Your deadline | A sensible timeline costs nothing extra; a rush means evenings or a bigger team |
| Your budget range | It tells the agency which version of the project to propose |
What you sell, to whom, where, and how big you are. Include what makes money, because that decides which pages get the most attention. “We are a nine-person joinery firm, and staircases are our most profitable work” is more useful than a mission statement.
Say what prompted the project: the current site is slow, it cannot be edited, you are launching a new service, enquiries have dropped. Then give one or two outcomes you would measure in a year. “Twelve staircase enquiries a month, up from six” gives a designer something to design towards. “A more modern look” does not.
Two or three types of visitor, what each one wants to find, and what you want them to do next. If most of your customers arrive on a phone after a Google search, say so.
List the pages you expect, even roughly. A sitemap scribbled as an indented list is perfect. Mark which pages exist already and which are new. Then answer the question that agencies most want answered: who is writing the text and providing the images, and when will they be ready?
Describe what the site should do in terms of what a visitor or a member of staff does, step by step. This is where vague words cost the most money.
| What people write | What an agency has to guess | Write this instead |
|---|---|---|
| “A booking system” | Anything from a link to a calendar tool to custom software | “Customers choose a 45-minute slot with one of two therapists and pay a £20 deposit by card” |
| “CRM integration” | A form that emails you, or a two-way sync | “Each enquiry should create a contact in HubSpot with the form fields. Nothing needs to come back to the website” |
| “An online shop” | Five products or five thousand | “About 40 products, no size options, UK delivery only, card and PayPal” |
| “Easy to update” | Text changes, or rebuilding layouts yourself | “Our office manager will add news posts and swap photos. She will not change layouts” |
| “SEO included” | A plugin installed, or a year of content work | “Keep our current rankings through redirects, and set titles and descriptions on every page” |
| “Clean, modern design” | Whatever the designer likes | Two websites you admire, with a sentence on what you like about each |
Send your logo files and brand colours if you have them, and say whether they are fixed. Name two or three sites you like and, more usefully, one you dislike. They do not have to be in your industry.
Agencies need to know what they are inheriting. Tell them what the current site is built on, who holds the domain name, where the site is hosted, and where your email lives. That last one matters: moving a website carelessly can take email down with it if both sit on the same server. If you do not know the answers, say so. An agency can look up the registrar, the host and the email provider in a few minutes. The one thing it cannot see is whose name the domain is registered in, so check that with whoever pays the renewal.
If the current site brings in enquiries from Google, say which pages or searches matter. A rebuild that changes addresses needs a redirect plan, which we cover in our website migration checklist. If you are unsure whether you need a rebuild at all, read rebuild versus refresh first.
Mention anything specific to your sector, such as FCA wording, SRA details or clinical registration numbers. Otherwise ask the agency to state how they handle three things: consent for any non-essential cookies, a privacy notice that matches the forms on the site, and accessibility. WCAG 2.2 AA is the legal standard for public sector sites and the sensible benchmark for everyone else, because the Equality Act duty to make reasonable adjustments applies to every business.
Give a range. More on this below, because it is the section people most want to leave blank.
A target launch date, the reason for it, and whether it is fixed. “Before our trade show on 14 May” is a fixed date. “Spring” is a preference. Also say when your content will be ready, because in our experience late content delays more projects than late code. Our guide to how long a website takes to build gives realistic durations.
Who signs off, how many agencies you are asking, when you will choose, and what you want back: a fixed price, a range, a proposal document, a call. We put more effort into a proposal when we know we are one of three, not one of fifteen, and most agencies are the same.
Who will update the site, whether you want training, and whether you want a quote for hosting and maintenance alongside the build.
Copy everything from here to the next heading into a document or an email and answer each prompt in a sentence or two. Leave a prompt blank if it does not apply. Write “not sure” where you are not sure.
1. About us
2. Why we need this project
3. Our visitors
4. Pages and content
5. Features
6. Design
7. Technical
8. Search and traffic
9. Legal
10. Budget
11. Timeline
12. Decision
13. After launch
Here is the template completed for a made-up business, a family joinery firm in Bristol. It is illustrative, not a client, but it is typical of the better briefs we receive. A brief like this takes about an hour to write.
| Section | What they wrote |
|---|---|
| About us | Nine-person joinery workshop in Bristol. We make staircases and fitted furniture for homeowners and small builders within about 40 miles. Staircases are our most profitable work. |
| Why now | The site is eight years old, built with a page builder nobody here can use, and slow on phones. We get about six staircase enquiries a month and want twelve within six months of launch. We also want fewer calls about work we do not do, such as flat-pack fitting. |
| Visitors | Homeowners mid-renovation, on a phone, wanting photos and a rough price. Builders wanting to know lead times and whether we fit. Both should send an enquiry with photos. |
| Pages and content | About 18: home, about, four service pages, seven project case studies shown in a gallery, how we work, FAQs, contact and three legal pages. We will write the service pages if you give us a structure. A photographer has shot the seven projects. We need team photos. |
| Features | Enquiry form where people can upload up to five photos and give rough dimensions. Gallery filtered by type of work. Our Google reviews shown on the home page. No shop and no bookings. Enquiries emailed to the office and added as a row in our jobs spreadsheet. Analytics with a proper consent banner. |
| Legal | No sector rules. Consent banner, a privacy notice covering the enquiry form and photo uploads, and WCAG 2.2 AA as the accessibility target. |
| Design | Logo and dark green are fixed. We like two furniture makers’ sites for their large photography and plain “prices from” tables. We dislike sliders. |
| Technical | WordPress. We own the domain. Hosting is with the previous designer and should move. Email is on Microsoft 365 and must not be disturbed. |
| Search | We are found for staircase searches in Bristol and Bath. Those pages must keep their positions. |
| Budget | £3,000 to £5,000 plus VAT for the build. Up to £100 a month to run. |
| Timeline | Live before March, when enquiries pick up. Flexible by a few weeks. Content ready by mid-January. |
| Decision | Two directors. Three agencies asked. We will choose within two weeks of receiving proposals and would like a fixed price and a call. |
| After launch | Our office manager will add case studies. One training session. Please quote for maintenance. |
With that in hand, an agency can price the job in an afternoon and has very little reason to pad it. On our own prices it would come to something like the Elite Website package at £999, which covers up to 15 unique pages with custom forms, plus roughly 20 hours of WordPress Development for the extra pages, the photo upload, the spreadsheet connection and the redirects: £1,000 less 15 % is £850. That is £1,849 plus £369.80 VAT, £2,218.80 in all, which is well under the bottom of their range. Another agency might propose something larger, and the firm could now see exactly what the extra money was for.
Yes. The worry is that if you say £5,000 the quote will be £4,999. With a poor agency it might be, and you would spot that by comparing three proposals. With a decent one, the budget tells them which solution to propose. A booking feature can be an inexpensive calendar tool embedded on a page or a custom system costing thousands, and both are legitimate answers. Without a number, the agency has to pick one blind.
If you have no idea what is realistic, anchor yourself on published prices. Ours are public: fixed-price packages from £430 plus VAT for a five-page site, £750 for ten pages with a CMS, £999 for up to 15 pages with bookings and payments, and £2,650 for a business site or online shop. Our guide to what a website costs in the UK sets those against the wider market. Then state a range you could really spend, and say what you would give up first if it will not stretch.
| Mistake | What it does to the quote | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| No budget given | Agencies guess, and quotes cannot be compared | Give a range, even a wide one |
| Forty requirements, all “essential” | Everything is priced at full cost | Split into must have at launch, and later |
| “Like Amazon” or “like Airbnb” | Signals a scope nobody can price honestly | Name the two or three behaviours you want from that site |
| Content left unmentioned | Either copywriting is added at agency rates, or the project stalls waiting for you | Say who writes what, and by when |
| Integrations mentioned after the quote | Change requests at the full hourly rate | List every system up front, even if you are unsure it needs connecting |
| A deadline with no reason behind it | A rush premium you may not have needed | Say whether the date is fixed and why |
| Asking for free design concepts | Agencies either decline or build the cost of losing pitches into everyone’s price | Judge on past work and a conversation |
| “Unlimited revisions” expected | A margin is added for the worst case | Agree two or three review rounds |
| Too many decision makers, revealed late | Extra meetings and rework get priced in on the next quote | Name the people who sign off in the brief |
As a guide, two or three pages for a brochure site and four or five for a shop or anything with logins. If you find yourself writing twenty pages about a web application with detailed rules for each screen, you are writing a specification, which is a different document and often something an agency should be paid to produce with you as a first stage.
Bullet points are fine. Nobody is marking the prose. Send it as a document or in the body of an email, attach the sitemap and any spreadsheets, and send the same version to every agency so the answers can be compared.
Send the brief to three or four agencies, not ten. Give them a week to ten days. A good agency will come back with questions before it comes back with a price, and that is a positive sign. An agency that quotes within the hour without asking anything has probably priced a template.
When the proposals arrive, check that each one answers the brief section by section, and note what each has left out. Our list of questions to ask a web development agency covers ownership, support and the other things that do not belong in a brief but do belong in the contract.
If a full brief is more than you need right now, our Get a quote planner is the quick alternative. It asks four short questions (the type of project, its scope, your timing and budget, and your contact details) and gives us enough to reply with a realistic range and the right follow-up questions. For a small site that is often all the brief there needs to be.
We are a web and software agency based in London, and we build sites for businesses across the UK through our web development service. If you have a brief written, send it to us. We will tell you what we would build, what it would cost on a package or on hours, and which parts of it we think you could leave until later.
A short description of your business, why you need the project and how you will measure success, who the visitors are, the pages and features you expect, who supplies the content, design preferences, your current domain, hosting and email set-up, budget range, timeline, and how and when you will choose an agency.
Two or three pages is enough for a brochure site, and four or five for an online shop or a site with customer logins. Bullet points are fine. If it runs to twenty pages of detailed rules, it has become a specification, which is usually written with the agency as a paid first stage.
Yes, as a range. Most features can be built at several levels of cost, so without a figure agencies have to guess which version you want and the quotes cannot be compared. A range such as £3,000 to £5,000 plus VAT lets each agency propose the best site for that money.
A brief describes the business, the goals and the outcome you want, and leaves the solution to the agency. A specification describes the solution in detail: every page, field, rule and integration. You write the brief to get quotes. The specification is normally produced after you have chosen who to work with.
Three or four. That is enough to compare approaches and prices without spending weeks in meetings. Tell each agency how many others you have asked. Most will put more effort into a proposal when they know they have a realistic chance of winning the work.
A short one still helps. For a five to ten page site, a single page covering what you do, the pages you want, who writes the content, your budget and your deadline is enough. A short quote form that asks about project type, scope, timing and budget does the same job.
Photo: Lucas Kepner via Unsplash
Guides
How to set up and run a Google Business Profile as a UK service business: verification, categories, address versus service area, reviews within Google's…
· 13 min read
Guides
The before, during and after checklist we use to move a website without losing Google rankings: URL inventory, 301 redirect map, launch-day steps and…
· 11 min read
Guides
For most UK businesses selling to UK customers, .co.uk is the right main domain, with .uk and .com bought as cheap insurance. How the…
· 11 min read
Ready when you are
A developer replies within one working day. Fixed price or hourly, your choice — and the code is yours.