How to Write a Website Brief Before You Hire a Designer

Most stalled web projects don't stall because the designer is bad or the client is difficult. They stall because nobody decided what the website was for before somebody started pushing pixels around. I've watched a three month project turn into a nine month project because we got four pages in and the owner finally said, out loud, "wait, I don't think we sell that anymore." That's not a design problem. That's a brief problem.

A brief is just a short document that says what you're building, who it's for, and what you want it to do. It doesn't need to be long or fancy. But when you show up with one, two things happen. You get better quotes because the designer isn't padding for the unknown. And you get a better website, because we spend our energy on your actual business instead of guessing at it for a month.

Here is what I wish every client brought to the first call. If you can answer even half of it before you hire anyone, you'll save yourself real money and probably a whole season of your life.

Start with the business, not the website

The single most useful thing you can tell me has nothing to do with color or layout. It's this: what does your business actually need more of right now? More phone calls? More booked estimates? Fewer tire-kickers wasting your time? More applications from good hires? Online orders?

A website is a tool, and you can't pick the right tool until you name the job. A med spa in Brentwood that wants to fill its calendar needs something completely different from a commercial HVAC company that wants three big contracts a year. Same "make me a website" request, two totally different builds.

So before anything else, write one or two sentences describing what a successful year looks like. Not "a nice website." Something like: "I want to book 15 new roof inspections a month without paying a lead service for them." Now we have a target, and every decision after this can be measured against it.

Name the one thing you want a visitor to do

This is the part people fight me on, and it's the part that matters most. Your website should have one primary conversion. One main action you're steering nearly everyone toward. Call now. Book a consult. Request a quote. Buy the thing.

You can have secondary actions, sure. A newsletter signup, a downloadable guide, a phone number in the header. But if everything is equally important, nothing is, and visitors freeze. I think of it like a good waiter. A great one doesn't hand you a 12 page menu and walk away. They say, "if it's your first time here, get the short rib." People want to be guided.

When you name your one primary action, a lot of downstream decisions get easy. Where the buttons go. What the homepage headline says. Whether you even need that seven-tab mega menu (you probably don't). If you want to go deeper on this, I broke down the pieces that actually move people to act in the essential elements of a high-converting website.

Get specific about who you're talking to

"Everyone" is not an audience. If your site tries to speak to homeowners, property managers, and general contractors all at once, it ends up sounding like a hold-music voice that connects with no one.

You don't need a fancy persona document. Just answer a few honest questions about the person you most want to reach:

• What are they actually worried about when they land on your site? (Price? Whether you're legit? How fast you can show up?)
• What do they already know, and what do you have to explain from scratch?
• What made your best past customers choose you over the other guy?
• What words do they use? Not industry jargon, their words.

That last one is gold. If your customers call it a "tankless water heater" and you call it "on-demand hydronic systems" on your site, you've quietly told them they're in the wrong place. I pull real language straight from sales calls and reviews and put it on the page. It converts better and, as a bonus, it usually matches what people type into Google.

Bring real content, or a real plan to get it

Here's the quiet killer of web projects, the thing that eats more timelines than anything else: content. Words. Photos. The actual stuff that goes on the pages.

Design goes fast. Writing the "About" page you've been avoiding for two years goes slow. I've had beautiful sites sit 90 percent finished for months because we were waiting on the owner to send bios, service descriptions, and photos that weren't blurry shots from a 2019 job site.

What counts as "real content"

• Your services or products, listed plainly, with a sentence or two on each and what makes yours different.
• Proof. Reviews, testimonials, before-and-afters, logos of clients, certifications, awards. Trust does the heavy lifting.
• Photos of the real thing. Your team, your work, your storefront. Stock photos of a headset call-center lady fool no one. If you need to book a photographer, do it early.
• The boring but critical stuff. Service area, hours, financing, warranties, licensing. The questions you answer on the phone ten times a week.

You don't have to write it all yourself. Plenty of designers, me included, offer copywriting. But you have to decide who's responsible for it before the project starts, because "we'll figure out content later" is how later becomes never. If you want a framework for how it all fits together, I'd read up on website content structure before you write a word.

Show me competitors you admire (and ones you don't)

Three to five links. That's all I need to understand your taste faster than any adjective you could give me. "Clean and modern" means fifty different things. A link means one specific thing.

Give me a mix. A couple of direct competitors whose sites you think work. A couple of businesses in totally different industries whose sites just feel right to you. And if you can, one or two you actively dislike, with a note on why. "I hate how you can't find their phone number" tells me more than a paragraph of vision-boarding.

Be honest about what you're reacting to, though. Sometimes a client points at a competitor's site and says "make mine like that," and what they actually admire is the photography or the confident writing, not the layout. Part of my job is figuring out which. But you give me a massive head start when you bring the references instead of making me fish for them.

Sort out the money and the platform reality

You don't need a precise number, but you need a range, and you need to be honest with yourself about it. A designer who quotes without knowing your budget is either guessing high to protect themselves or guessing low to win the job, and both hurt you.

Quotes for what looks like "the same website" swing wildly, from a few hundred dollars to well into five figures, and there are real reasons for that. I laid out the whole picture in what a small business website really costs in 2026, and it's worth reading before you get sticker shock or, worse, before you assume the cheapest quote and the expensive one are the same thing wearing different price tags.

A few money questions to answer up front

• What's the range you're genuinely comfortable spending, including a little cushion?
• Is this a one-time build, or do you also need someone handling updates, hosting, and security after launch?
• Do you have a hard deadline tied to something real, like a grand opening or a busy season?
• Who owns the site and the domain when it's done? (Ask this. Please ask this.)

On platform: you don't have to know whether you want Webflow, WordPress, Shopify, or something custom. That's my call to make based on your needs, and I explain the trade-offs in plain terms, like the ones I covered in Webflow vs WordPress. But you should tell me if you're currently stuck on a platform you hate, or if there's a system your team already lives in that the site needs to talk to.

Decide who's actually making decisions

This one sounds like a technicality and it is secretly one of the biggest predictors of whether a project goes smoothly. Who signs off? If it's just you, great, we move fast. If your business partner, your spouse, and your office manager all get a vote, I need to know that on day one, not in week six when three people leave conflicting feedback on the same page.

Design by committee, without a clear final decider, is where good projects go to die slowly. Pick one person to own the final yes. Everyone else can have input, but input and authority are different jobs. When feedback rounds turn into a group text of contradictory opinions, timelines double and budgets follow.

Same goes for logins and access. Who has the domain registrar password? The old hosting account? The Google Business Profile? Round these up before the project starts. I've spent more billable hours than I'd like tracking down a domain someone registered on a personal Gmail account eight years ago and forgot about.

Think past launch to how you'll get found

A brief that only covers "the website" and ignores how people will actually arrive at it is half a plan. A gorgeous site nobody visits is a very expensive business card in a drawer.

You don't have to solve this before design, but you should at least name your intended traffic sources so nothing gets built that quietly undercuts them. If you're counting on showing up in local searches, that shapes the site's structure and the content from the start, which is the whole point of doing SEO as part of the build instead of bolting it on later. If you're planning to run paid search, we'll likely want focused landing pages that match each ad, not one homepage doing all the work.

For a lot of the local businesses I work with around Franklin and the wider Nashville area, the honest answer is a blend: reviews and word of mouth, local search, and a little paid traffic to prime the pump. Just tell me which levers you plan to pull. It changes what we build.

A simple brief you can write in an afternoon

You don't need a template with fifty fields. If you can answer these prompts in a shared doc, you're ahead of ninety percent of the people who hire a designer:

1. What does a successful year look like for this website, in plain numbers if you can.
2. The one action you most want a visitor to take.
3. Who you're talking to, and what they're worried about.
4. What content you have and what you still need to create, and who's responsible.
5. Three to five reference sites, the good and the bad, with a note on why.
6. Your budget range and any real deadline.
7. Who has final say, and where all your logins live.
8. How people will find the site once it's live.

If you want a gut check on where your current site stands before you write any of this, run it through my website performance scorecard. It'll surface a few concrete problems worth mentioning in your brief.

The brief is the cheapest part of the whole project

An afternoon of honest thinking, before anyone touches a design, is the highest-return work you'll do on the entire project. It costs you nothing but attention, and it saves you the two things small businesses can least afford to burn: months and thousands of dollars.

The clients who show up with even a rough version of this, scribbled on a notepad, no formatting, consistently end up with better websites and shorter timelines. Not because the document is magic, but because writing it forces the real decisions to the surface while they're still cheap to make. Make them now, on paper, and the design stops being a guessing game and starts being what it should be: the visible result of a plan you already trust.