What a good brief looks like

Most people think the slow part of a website is the building. It is not. The slow part is the fortnight of small corrections that happen because nobody agreed what the thing was for.

A good brief is not long. The ones that work are usually a page. What matters is which page.

Start with what happens if it does not exist

Before anything about pages or colours, answer this: what goes wrong for you if this site never gets built?

If the answer is "nothing really, it would just be nice to have", that is worth knowing on day one. Plenty of projects should not start, and finding that out before anyone spends money is a good outcome.

If the answer is "we lose enquiries because people cannot tell what we do", now there is something to build towards, and every later decision has a test to pass.

Name the one action

Every page exists to make somebody do something. Book a call. Request a quote. Apply. Buy.

Pick one per page and say it out loud. Sites fail when they try to do four things equally well, because a visitor faced with four options takes none of them.

This is also the fastest way to settle arguments later. Does the testimonial go above the pricing? Whichever gets more people to the one action.

Describe the person, not the demographic

"Small businesses in the UK" tells me nothing.

"A facilities manager at a manufacturing firm, who has been told to find a supplier by Friday, who will open this on a phone between meetings, and who will not read more than two paragraphs before deciding" tells me almost everything. Layout, tone, length, what goes first.

You do not need research for this. You have spoken to these people. Write down what they are actually like.

Bring the content, or admit you cannot

This is where projects stall more than anywhere else.

Design is fast. Copy is slow, because copy requires deciding what you think. A site can sit at ninety percent finished for six weeks waiting on three paragraphs and a headshot.

So be honest at the start. Either you are writing it, someone you are paying is writing it, or I am drafting it for you to correct. All three work. What does not work is assuming it will appear.

Same with images. If there are no photographs, say so now and we plan around it rather than leaving grey boxes everywhere and hoping.

List what it has to connect to

Forms have to go somewhere. Bookings have to land in a calendar. Leads have to reach whoever chases them, in the tool they already use.

Write down the tools you already run on. Not the ones you are thinking of moving to next year. The ones open on your screen right now.

The single most common post-launch complaint is not about design. It is that enquiries go to an inbox nobody watches.

Say what already works

If you have an existing site, something on it is working. Maybe one page brings in most of the enquiries. Maybe you rank for a term you did not target.

Tell me that before we start, because the most expensive thing a redesign can do is quietly delete the part that was earning.

Three things that do not belong in a brief

A list of sites you like, with no reason. "Make it like this one" is not usable. "I like how this one says what it does in the first line" is.

Exact page counts. You do not know yet, and neither do I. The structure comes out of the content.

Technology choices. Unless you have a real constraint, like an existing system this has to live inside, leave the stack to me. If it turns out to matter, I will raise it.

What this buys you

A brief like this is maybe forty minutes of thinking and a page of writing.

In exchange, the first draft you see is close enough to argue with instead of close enough to start over. That is the whole difference between a build that takes days and one that drags for a month while everyone slowly works out what they meant.

The specification is the prompt. That is not a metaphor. A vague brief produces a vague first draft, and correcting a vague draft takes longer than writing the thing by hand.