The brief that gets an accurate quote fits on one page. Most people send five, or half of one.
Download it, fill it in, send it to whoever you like, including people who are not us. A brief this short gets you comparable quotes, which is the only way to tell whether one of them is taking you for a ride.
No email, no sign-up, no follow-up call. It is a PDF on a server.
Download the template (PDF, one page)Two things happen when a brief is bad. Either you get a suspiciously low number that grows once work starts, or you get a high one, because the agency has padded it to cover everything you might have meant. Both are your fault, not theirs, and both are fixable in twenty minutes.
The eight questions that actually matter
What is the site for, in one sentence
Not what it contains. What it is for. "Get plumbers in Watford to ring us" is a brief. "A modern, professional web presence" is a wish, and it cannot be quoted or tested.
Who is coming to it
Name them. Trade buyers, homeowners, HR managers at firms of two hundred people. The audience decides the tone, the structure and half the design decisions, and getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake on this list.
What should happen when they arrive
Ring, fill in a form, book a slot, buy the thing, download the spec sheet. One primary action. If you list four, you will get a site that does none of them well.
How many pages, roughly
Rough is fine. Five, ten, forty. The difference between five and ten is a few hundred pounds. The difference between ten and forty is a different project.
What has to connect to what
Your booking system, your accounting software, your stock, your CRM, your existing customer logins. This is where quotes diverge the most, because integrations are where the unknown time hides.
Who writes the words and who provides the pictures
Most delays on most website projects are waiting for content. Decide now whether that is you or them, and price it either way.
Your budget range
Say it. Withholding it does not get you a better price, it gets you a quote for the wrong thing. A range is enough. Most people who refuse to name one do so because they genuinely do not know, in which case say that instead.
When it has to be live, and why that date
A date attached to a reason gets planned around. A date with no reason attached gets quietly ignored by everybody, including you.
What to leave out
- Links to five sites you like, with no note on what you like about them. Colours? Layout? The tone of the writing? Without that, it is a puzzle rather than a reference.
- Technology choices, unless you have a real reason. Specifying WordPress or React in a brief narrows the field before anyone has understood the problem.
- A page-by-page structure written before anyone has thought about the audience. That is the output of the work, not the input.
How to use the quotes you get back
Send the same one page to three people. When the numbers come back, the useful question is not which is cheapest, it is which two are quoting for the same thing. If one is half the others, it is almost always missing the integrations, the content, or both. Ask what is excluded rather than what is included. The excluded list is the honest one.
Same questions, in a form, with a written plan back within one working day. No call unless you ask for one.
Or fill it in here and we will reply in writing