Why most briefs are useless.
I have received dozens of website briefs over the years. The most common version goes something like: "I need a website for my business, something clean and modern, not too busy, with a contact form." That is not a brief. That is a mood. A developer reading it has to make every single meaningful decision themselves, and those decisions will probably be wrong because they do not know your business, your customers, or what the site is meant to achieve.
The other common failure is the opposite: a twenty-page document copied from a corporate procurement template that asks about server uptime guarantees and accessibility audits, when what you actually need is a five-page trade site for a plumber in Faversham. Neither extreme is useful. What you want is a concise document — honestly, a page or two is fine — that answers the questions a good builder will need to do their best work.
Start with the job, not the design.
Before you describe colours or fonts, write down what you need the website to do. Not in abstract terms. In concrete, measurable ones. "I want people to find me on Google when they search for a roofer in Deal" is a job. "I want visitors to be able to book a 30-minute consultation and pay a £50 deposit" is a job. "I want to look professional so that when people Google me after a referral, they feel confident" is also a job — and a legitimate one.
When I was running my own e-commerce businesses, the discipline I tried to apply was this: could I tell, six months after launch, whether the website had done its job? If the answer was no, the job was not specific enough. That same test applies to a brief. If you write "I want to look good online", there is no way to ever know if it worked.
The audience question, answered honestly.
Who is the site for? This sounds obvious, but I see briefs all the time where the honest answer turns out to be "my competitors" or "my mum". Neither of those is a paying customer.
Try to describe the actual person who will land on the site and decide whether to get in touch. Where are they? What do they already know about your type of business? Are they comparing you against three others, or have they been referred directly and just need to confirm you are legitimate? A Canterbury solicitor's site and a Whitstable kayak hire company are serving very different visitors, and those visitors need completely different things from a homepage.
If you serve a local area — say, drainage work across East Kent — say so explicitly. It matters for the copy, for the pages you need, and for how Google will treat the site. "I cover Canterbury, Folkestone, and anywhere within about 25 miles" is far more useful to a web builder than "local and regional".
List the pages you think you need, then question each one.
Most small business sites need fewer pages than the owner thinks. A five-page site with sharp copy will outperform a fifteen-page site with thin content almost every time, partly because it is easier to build, easier to maintain, and easier for Google to understand.
Write down every page you think you need, then ask yourself: would a visitor miss this if it did not exist? Home, services, about, contact — those earn their place. A separate page for each of your twelve services when they are all variations of the same thing? Probably not. A blog you will update once and then forget? Honestly, no.
That said, if you genuinely serve distinct customer types — say, a wedding photographer who also does commercial headshots — two separate service pages can make real sense because the visitor, the message, and the call to action are all different.
Existing brand: what you have and what you want kept.
If you already have a logo, a colour palette, fonts, or printed materials you are happy with, say so and share the files. A good web builder will work within what exists rather than reinventing it. If you have a logo in a format you cannot share electronically — I have been sent a photo of a business card before — say that too, and budget a small amount for someone to redraw it as a proper SVG or EPS file.
If you are starting fresh, a brief for a website is also a reasonable moment to flag that you need the brand sorted first. Building a site before you have a settled name and a working logo is putting the cart before the horse. I have seen it done, and it always means going back and redoing things that should have been settled before the first line of CSS was written.
Budget: say the number, even if it feels awkward.
The single most useful line in any website brief is the budget. Not a range from £0 to whatever it takes, but an actual number or a firm ceiling. "I have around £1,500 to spend" immediately tells a builder what is and is not possible. It prevents the embarrassing situation where you receive a quote for £4,000 and the builder has spent three hours scoping something you could never afford.
I am not suggesting you throw money at it unnecessarily. A straightforward five-page site for a local trade in Kent does not need to cost £5,000. But it also cannot be built properly for £200, and if someone is quoting you £200, you should ask very specific questions about what that actually includes and whether you will own the result. Hosting on a platform you do not control, templates you cannot modify, content you have to pay extra to update — these are common gotchas at the budget end, and a clear brief protects you from them.
Timescales and the one date that actually matters.
If there is a hard deadline — you are launching at an event, you have a PR piece coming out, your current site goes dark on a specific date — state it clearly at the top of the brief. Builders can often accommodate tight timelines if they know about them in advance. They very rarely can if you mention the deadline in the final week.
Most small business websites take two to six weeks from a signed brief to a live site, depending on how quickly content and approvals move. The thing that most commonly delays a project is not the builder — it is the client not providing photos, copy, or decisions when they are needed. A brief that acknowledges this upfront ("I can have all copy and images to you by X") is a brief that tends to produce a site that actually launches.
What to attach to your brief.
Three to five websites you genuinely like, with a note on what you like about each one. Not "I want something like Apple's website" — that is not helpful. But "I like how this Canterbury bakery's site leads straight into the menu without any splash screens" is actionable. Similarly, one or two examples of sites you dislike, with a note on why, can save a lot of back-and-forth.
Beyond references: your existing logo files if you have them, any photography you own and want to use, and your Google Business Profile URL if you have one set up — it gives context on how you currently present yourself online. If you have printed brochures or flyers, a scan or photo is useful. The more a builder understands your business before the first conversation, the less time you spend explaining it and the more time gets spent on building.