Our Approach

Creating a Website Brief

'How much does a website cost?' is the question I'm asked more than any other! It's also the one I can't honestly answer without knowing considerably more. A website is like a house. Two people can both say they want 'a house', and one means a studio flat while the other means a five-bedroom farmhouse. Same word, completely different brief. The clearer your brief, the more accurate my advice and guide price, the quicker and easier it'll be to get started.

In my experience, the clients who get the most from a project, the ones who end up with a website they're genuinely proud of, are the ones who came prepared. Not necessarily with all the answers. Not with a detailed technical specification. Just with a thoughtful set of notes that shows they've genuinely considered what they need and why.

A brief doesn't have to be long, formal, or perfectly written. It just has to be honest. The process of writing it often reveals things about your own business, your priorities, and your audience that you hadn't quite articulated before. That clarity is valuable — not just for me, but for you.

What follows is a guide to the kind of information that helps me give you the most useful, accurate advice from our very first conversation.

The best briefs don't just tell me what you want. They tell me who you are.

About Your Business

Before I can make any meaningful recommendations about your website, I need to understand the business behind it. This isn't background noise. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

Tell me about your company: what you do, how long you've been doing it, and where you're headed. A business in its first year has very different needs to an established company that's been trading for a decade. A solo consultant has different priorities to a ten-person agency.

Some of the most useful things to cover here:

  • What does your business do?
    A plain-English description of your product or service, written as if you're explaining it to someone at a dinner party, not a boardroom.
  • What makes you different?
    What do you do better than your competitors? What do your clients say when they recommend you? Your website should lead with this.
  • What are your business goals?
    Are you trying to grow, enter a new market, or reposition the brand? Are you trying to reduce enquiry time by making more information available online? Knowing your goals helps me build a website that serves them.
  • Who are your competitors?
    A few competitor website URLs are incredibly useful. Not to copy them, but to understand the market you're operating in and where you want to stand out.

About Your Current Website

If you already have a website, I want to know what's working and, more importantly, what isn't. Be as honest as you can here. "The design is outdated and I'm embarrassed to share the link" is genuinely useful feedback.

  • What do you like about it?
    Even a website you want to replace will have things worth keeping: a particular page structure, a piece of copy, or a colour you still love.
  • What's not working?
    Is it slow? Hard to update? Not converting visitors into enquiries? Doesn't reflect the business you've become? Getting specific here helps me understand the real problem we're solving.
  • How old is the current site?
    A seven-year-old website often carries legacy decisions that need addressing rather than carrying forward.
  • Do you have analytics?
    Even a high-level picture (top pages, bounce rates, where visitors drop off) can inform how we approach the new structure. If you have Google Analytics, I'll want to take a look.
A website project is an opportunity to think clearly about what your business needs to say, and to whom.

Your Audience

This is the area where briefs are most often thinner than they should be. "Our target audience is businesses and individuals" is not an audience. It's a description of almost everyone on earth.

The more precisely you can define your audience, the better. Not because I need demographic data for its own sake but because the way you speak to a 55-year-old finance director is very different to how you speak to a 28-year-old start-up founder. Even if you're selling them exactly the same service.

  • Who are your ideal clients?
    Industry, company size, seniority, geography. The clearer the picture, the sharper the messaging.
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
    What brings someone to your website? What are they looking for, and what would make them pick up the phone or fill in a contact form?
  • What do they already know?
    Are they experts in your field, or do they need educating? This affects everything from the language we use to how much detail we go into on each page.

Features & Technical Requirements

Here's where a lot of briefs either go quiet, or go completely overboard. Some clients list every feature they've ever seen on a website with no sense of priority. Others don't mention that they need an e-commerce store until three weeks into the project.

I don't expect you to know the technical solution. That's my job. But it helps enormously to describe the functions you need in plain language:

  • Content management: Do you need to update the website yourself, adding news articles, team members, case studies? Or would you rather everything comes through me?
  • Enquiries and actions: What do you want people to do when they land on your site? Enquire? Book? Apply? Download something? Each of these is a different technical consideration.
  • E-commerce: If you sell online, tell me what you're selling: physical goods, digital downloads, subscriptions, and roughly how many products. A shop with three products is a fundamentally different build to one with three hundred.
  • Third-party integrations: Do you use a CRM, a booking system, a payment gateway, or a live chat platform? If these need to connect to your website, they need to be in scope from the start.
  • Multilingual requirements: Do you need the site in multiple languages? This affects structure, content and cost in ways that can't be retrofitted later.

If you're unsure whether something is technically feasible, just describe what you want to achieve. Bring me the problem, not the solution. Working out the solution is what you're paying me for.

Content & Structure

Content is the part of a website project most often underestimated, both in effort and in importance. A beautifully designed website is effectively worthless without clear, well-written content behind it.

At brief stage I'm not asking you to have your copy written and your photography done. I am asking you to think about it:

  • Who will write the copy?
    Will you write it yourself, or do you need help? Be honest: the quality of the words is just as important as the quality of the design, and it's usually the part that takes longest.
  • What pages do you need?
    Start with the obvious pages (Home, About, Services, Contact), then think about anything specific to your business: a portfolio, a case studies section, a pricing page, a team directory, a blog.
  • What imagery do you have?
    Professional photography makes an enormous difference to the finished result. If you don't have it yet, factor it into your planning. Stock images can work as a temporary measure, but genuine photography of your business, your people, and your work is almost always worth the investment.
The best websites aren't built from templates. They're built from a thorough understanding of the brief.

Brand & Design Direction

If you have an existing brand (a logo, a colour palette, brand guidelines), bring it all to the table at the start. The website needs to work with and extend your existing identity, not fight against it.

If your brand is in need of attention, a website project is often a natural trigger for a refresh or a full rebrand. This is a conversation worth having before we start rather than halfway through, because the brand underpins every design decision. You can read more about how I approach this in The process of logo design and branding.

In terms of design direction, a few things are genuinely useful to capture:

  • Websites you admire: Not necessarily in your industry. Three or four sites that feel visually right for your brand give me a much clearer sense of your taste than a paragraph of adjectives ever will.
  • Websites you dislike: Equally useful. If you hate a certain aesthetic, I need to know. Subjective taste matters, and I'd rather surface any conflict early.
  • Words that describe your desired tone: Modern? Traditional? Clinical? Warm? Bold? Understated? Just a handful of words that feel right for the brand you want to project.

Marketing & Search

A website that nobody can find is a very expensive business card. From the first line of code, I build with search and discoverability in mind, but I need to understand your marketing context to do this intelligently.

  • Search engine optimisation (SEO): Do you have existing rankings you want to protect? Keywords or topics you want to target? Existing pages that get significant traffic? All of this needs to be factored into the site architecture from the start, not added as an afterthought.
  • Existing marketing activity: Do you run Google Ads, email campaigns, or social media? Knowing how the website fits into your broader marketing picture helps me structure pages and calls-to-action appropriately.
  • Analytics and measurement: How do you currently measure success? If you don't have Google Analytics in place, we'll set it up. If you do, I'll make sure the new site maintains continuity and we don't lose your historical data.

Budget & Timeframes

I know that talking about budget can feel uncomfortable, but being upfront about it makes the process better for both of us. I'm not here to extract as much as possible from a vague brief. I'm here to give you the best possible result within a realistic budget. Knowing your budget helps me scope the project sensibly: where to focus the effort, where to phase the work, and whether what you've described is achievable within what you have to spend.

If you genuinely don't know what a fair budget is, that's fine. Just say so, and I'll give you an honest range based on what you've described.

On timescales: if there's a hard deadline (a product launch, a trade show, a rebrand announcement), tell me now. Deadlines are manageable when they're planned for. They become expensive and stressful when they surface halfway through a project.

  • Your approximate budget range: Even a broad range ("somewhere between £3,000 and £6,000" or "we have meaningful budget and want to do this properly") is more useful than nothing.
  • Any fixed deadlines: Hard dates with the reason behind them.
  • A phased approach: If budget is a constraint, consider whether the project can be delivered in stages. Phase one covers the core; phase two adds the blog, the client portal, or the e-commerce element once the foundation is working well.

Ready to Talk?

You don't need perfect answers to every question here before you reach out. The brief is a starting point, not a finished document. What matters is that you've genuinely thought about your business, your audience, and what you want to achieve. That thinking is what makes a great project possible.

If you'd like to understand more about how the project unfolds once your brief is in place, read The process of creating a website. Or, if you're ready to have a conversation, get in touch and we'll take it from there.

Terry Upton
Written by
Terry Upton
25+ years experience in branding, websites and client support.

Let's chat about your project

Every project is different, and we’d love to hear about yours.

01908 668665 [email protected]

FAQs

The answers to your questions.

Do I need to write a formal document before getting in touch?

Not at all. A few bullet points in an email, a voice note, even a scribbled list — anything that captures your thinking is a valid starting point. The goal is to come to the first conversation having genuinely thought about what you need, not to produce a polished specification. The more structured brief can come later, once we've talked and I have a clearer sense of direction.

What if I don't know my budget?

It's more common than you'd think. If you genuinely have no frame of reference, just describe the scope of what you need as clearly as you can and I'll give you an honest range. What's less helpful is saying 'as cheap as possible' — that tells me nothing about the project and often leads to a scope that doesn't serve the business. Website projects vary enormously in cost, from a few thousand pounds for a lean, well-crafted static site to considerably more for complex, feature-rich builds. The brief is what determines where on that spectrum you fall.

My requirements might change during the project — is that a problem?

Some evolution is completely normal and expected, especially on longer projects. The brief doesn't lock you in forever. What it does is establish a clear baseline so that when things change, we both understand what's changed and what the implications are. Scope changes late in a project are more expensive than scope changes at the briefing stage — not because I'm inflexible, but because work already done may need to be revisited. The earlier we surface requirements, the better for everyone.

What if I don't have brand guidelines or existing design assets?

That's absolutely fine, and it's a very common starting point — especially for new businesses or companies that have grown organically without ever formalising their brand. In that case, the brief simply needs to cover the design direction you're aiming for: the feel, the tone, the websites you admire. We can build the brand and the website together, with the branding work informing the design at every stage. Read more about how I approach that process in The process of logo design and branding.

How long does the briefing process take?

That depends on how prepared you are, but most first conversations run between thirty minutes and an hour. If you've worked through the questions in this article beforehand, we can cover a lot of ground quickly. If the project is more complex, there may be a follow-up discovery session before I put together a proposal. Either way, the time spent at the start is always paid back in a smoother, faster, better-quality project at the other end.

Wait, I've got more questions!

Let's chat directly. I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have, so please don’t hesitate to ask, no matter how small or trivial they may seem. I’m here to help and guide you through the whole process.