Website brief template: what to send an agency

The template’s further down, copy it and fill it in. A scruffy brief with a real budget in it is more use to me than a polished 30-page document with “TBC” where the money should be.

I read every enquiry that comes into Genius Division myself, so this is the version I’d like to get.

What does an agency need from you?

Less than you’d think. The enquiry slip on our start page asks what you need, picked from a list (a new website, an online shop, booking or ticketing, a web app, branding, and a couple more, with “Not sure yet” at the bottom). Then it asks roughly what the budget is. Then there’s one box, and the hint under it asks what the business does and what’s not working, plus when you need it by.

That’s enough to start a conversation. The template below is for when you want the first call to get somewhere faster, or you’re sending the same brief to four agencies and want quotes back that you can actually compare.

The website brief template

Copy this, delete anything that doesn’t apply, and don’t worry about making it sound nice.

1. The business. What you do and who for, in one sentence a stranger would understand.
2. What’s not working. The problem, in your own words. “We get no enquiries.” “Everything comes in by phone.” “We can’t add the pages we need.”
3. What the website has to do. Bring in leads, sell products, take bookings, collect email addresses or show off your work. Pick the one that pays the bills.
4. Who’s visiting. Who your customers are, and what they need to do when they land.
5. How you make money. One-off sales or subscriptions? Do people book a call first, or buy straight away?
6. What you’re like. Three-piece suit, or trainers and a cup of tea.
7. Features. Booking, a quote calculator, a login area, a shop. Only the ones you’re sure about.
8. Other software. Your CRM, email marketing, payments, accounts. Anything the website has to talk to.
9. Words and photos. Have you got them, or do they need writing and taking?
10. Your current website. The address, roughly how many pages and blog posts are on it, whether you can get into the analytics, and who hosts it.
11. Budget. A number or a range.
12. Deadline. The date, and why it’s that date.
13. Who decides. The person who signs it off, and whether they’ll be on the call.

Thirteen headings looks like a lot. Most of them are one line.

Why is “what’s not working” the most important box?

Because that’s the bit we build everything else around. A feature list is somebody’s guess at the answer, and some of those guesses are wrong.

Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads back. They brought us in to find out why. The website took ten seconds to load, so more than half of the people they were paying Google to send there gave up before it appeared. We rebuilt it. It loads in about a second now and brings in 150 to 200 leads a month.

Glasscraft had a 15-year-old website, and if a customer wanted a quote or wanted to know where their order was, they picked up the phone. That one sentence of problem turned into a Quick Quote tool that brings in 60 to 80 quote requests a month, and an order tracker wired into their manufacturing system that’s used 100 to 200 times a month. That’s 100 to 200 phone calls the team don’t have to take any more.

Cannon Hall Farm are a good example of a brief that writes itself. Weather guarantees, livestreamed events you pay to watch from your sofa, sessions with two different start times on the same day, memberships. Their ticketing platform couldn’t bend to any of that, so the farm was doing the bending instead. A list of things you want to do and can’t is about the most useful thing you can send an agency.

So write the problem down the way you’d say it to a mate. We’ll translate.

Put a number in the budget box

If you leave the budget blank, the agency guesses. You’ll get a quote for something you can’t afford or something smaller than you wanted, and you’ll find out a week later in a proposal.

Our form has four options: £5,000 to £8,000, £8,000 to £12,000, £12,000 or more, and “Not sure yet”. Ticking “Not sure yet” is fine. Most of the websites we build land between £8,000 and £12,000, and I’ve gone through where that comes from in how much a website costs in the UK.

Headings 7 to 10 in the template are there for a reason. Pages, custom features, a shop, other software, words and photos, moving old content across. That’s the list on our pricing page of what moves the price up or down, so if you’ve filled those in, an agency can give you a decent ballpark without much guessing.

Why does a brief need to say how you make money?

I spent a while testing Claude Code earlier this year. I gave it a design I’d made in Figma and it built the thing more or less pixel perfect, on WordPress. Then I noticed what it hadn’t done. It never asked about calls to action, or how the website was meant to make money, or who was going to visit it and what they needed to do when they got there.

A lot of human agencies don’t ask either, which is why headings 3 to 6 are in the template. Is the website there to get leads for your sales team? Sell things while you’re asleep? Book appointments? Collect email addresses? Everything on the page follows from that. On Rucklidge Law’s website, for example, the whole site points at one button: “Book your free 30-minute consultation now.” We couldn’t have picked that without knowing how they get clients.

“What you’re like” sounds daft but it changes everything. Are you the accountant in the three-piece suit who talks about tax efficiency, or the one in trainers who explains it in plain English over a brew? Both are fine. They want different websites.

▶Play the video: 3 things Claude Code will never understand about websites

What happens on the first call?

Ours is 30 minutes. We spend most of it asking questions about the project, and before you hang up you’ll get a ballpark figure. If we both want to carry on, you get a fixed price before anything starts, and we agree a payment schedule with you up front, so you’re not paying it all in one go.

If you’ve sent a brief like the one above, we skip the warm-up and get straight to the useful bit. If you haven’t, don’t panic. Those headings are roughly what I’d ask you on the phone anyway.

Before the call, it’s worth reading how to choose a web design agency as well, because the call is your chance to interview them too.

What should you leave out?

A competitor’s website you want copied. Send it as a reference if you like, but if the brief says “make it like theirs”, you’ll end up with a cheaper version of somebody else.

A wish list of 40 features. If you’re not sure you need a member area, leave it off and ask on the call. Every “just in case” feature goes on the price.

Anything about wanting it to “pop”. Everybody wants it to pop. Tell me who your customers are and I’ll sort the popping.