How to brief a web designer.

A web design briefis a one-page document that tells a designer who your business is, who your visitors are, what those visitors need to do, what evidence makes them trust you, what constraints exist, and how you’ll know the site has worked. Good briefs are short because the decisions are made; long briefs are long because they aren’t. A usable brief fits on a single A4 page, takes about forty minutes to write, and saves roughly two weeks of back-and-forth once the project starts.

Why most briefs fail

Most briefs land in one of two shapes. The first is a single sentence in an email: “Hi, I need a website, can we chat?” The second is a twenty-page PDF exported from a Notion page that’s been edited for six months by three different people. Both produce the same outcome: a long discovery call where the designer asks the same six questions the brief was supposed to answer.

The sentence-long brief fails because the buyer hasn’t made the decisions yet. The twenty-page brief fails for the same reason, it just hides it better. A brief that tells me every colour you might consider, every feature you might want, and every page you might build isn’t a brief — it’s a menu. You’re asking the designer to choose. That’s the wrong job.

A good brief commits. It says, “here’s what the site is for, here’s who reads it, here’s what they do next.” Everything else follows from those three answers.

The six questions a brief should answer

Every usable brief I’ve received in the last two years answers some version of these six questions, in this order.

1. Who is the business?

Two or three sentences. What you do, who you do it for, how long you’ve been doing it. Not the “About Us” page — just the stuff a stranger would need to know before reading on. Skip the mission statement.

2. Who is the visitor?

One paragraph, specific. Not “everyone who might want our service”. Write it like a person: “A couple in their thirties who are getting married next summer and have found us through a referral.” If you have more than one type of visitor, list two or three, but note which one matters most.

3. What do you need them to do?

One thing, ideally. Book a call. Buy a product. Download a PDF. Send an enquiry. If you list five things, you’ll get a site that tries to do five things and nails none of them. Pick the primary action and let the others come second.

4. What makes them trust you?

Three or four real pieces of evidence. Client logos, case studies, testimonials, qualifications, years in business, press mentions, awards. If you don’t have these yet, say so — the designer will build a page that doesn’t rely on them. Don’t invent them.

5. What are the constraints?

Budget, timeline, brand colours if any exist, technical requirements (a specific CMS, a specific domain, an existing integration). The constraints section is what separates a brief from a fantasy. A brief without a budget is a daydream with a letterhead.

6. How will you know it worked?

One or two measurable outcomes. Twenty enquiries a month. Five bookings a week. A conversion rate above 3%. If you can’t measure it, the site can’t be judged to have succeeded or failed — which makes the whole project impossible to finish.

A worked example

Here’s an anonymised version of a real brief I received earlier this year. The full client job finished in seven days; the brief itself took the buyer about forty-five minutes to write.

That’s the whole brief. Six paragraphs. Everything else got discussed on a twenty-minute call. The site went live on day seven and the client booked four discovery calls in its first week — half the monthly target, in a third of the time.

The mistakes I see most often

Listing pages instead of goals

“I need a homepage, about page, services page, blog, contact page, team page, and a portfolio.” That’s a sitemap, not a brief. It also usually wrong — most small businesses need three or four pages, not seven. Tell me what you want the site to do; let me tell you which pages to build.

Describing the visuals before the visitor

“I want it to feel minimal and premium, with big headlines and a dark mode toggle.” That’s an aesthetic preference, and it’s fine — but it goes in the constraints section, not the top of the brief. The designer’s job is to make visual choices in service ofthe visitor’s task. Starting with visuals inverts the order.

Vague success criteria

“I want it to feel more professional.” Professional compared to what? Measured how? If you can’t answer, the designer has no way to know when they’re done. Either pick a number or pick a specific reference site.

Hiding the budget

The most common mistake, by a distance. Buyers think keeping the budget hidden gives them negotiating power. In practice it just means the designer quotes for the wrong project. A brief without a budget gets a quote for everything in the brief — which is almost always more than the buyer wanted to spend. Tell the truth; get a realistic proposal.

What to leave out

Three things don’t belong in the brief, even though they get included all the time.

• Feature lists.“Must have live chat, booking system, blog, newsletter, member login.” Features are implementation details. Tell me the goal; let me propose the right features for the budget.
• Competitor analysis.A sentence is fine (“our main competitors are X and Y”). A fifteen-page teardown belongs in a strategy document, not a brief.
• Technical preferences.Unless you have a real reason to pick a specific stack, trust the designer. “Must be built on WordPress” without a reason eliminates better options and costs you money.

The one-page brief template

To save you the forty-five minutes of structuring, there’s a free one-page brief template on the resources page — the same structure I ask every new client to use. It takes the six questions above and gives you a fill-in format you can edit in Notion, Google Docs, or on paper.

→ Download the one-page brief template

The other two resources in the same pack — the launch checklist and the sprint planner — handle the parts of the project that come after the brief is accepted.

The honest conclusion

A brief isn’t paperwork. It’s the moment you decide what the project is. The designer can’t make that decision for you, and the ones who try will build the wrong thing convincingly.

Forty-five minutes of clear thinking up front saves two weeks of vague revisions later. If you’re already stuck on the brief, that’s the project’s real blocker — not the design, not the budget, not the timeline. Get the page right and the site mostly builds itself.