Most website briefs describe a website. That sounds obvious, and it's the reason so many of them produce quotes that can't be compared and projects that go over. A brief that works describes a business problem and lets the studios tell you how they'd solve it. Here's what to put in one.
Lead with what changed, not what you want built
The single most useful paragraph in any brief explains why you're doing this now. You've moved into a new market. Enquiries have dropped and you don't know why. A competitor launched something and it's costing you. Someone senior has finally lost patience with the current site.
That paragraph does more work than a page of requirements, because it tells a studio what success actually looks like. Two studios given the same feature list will produce near-identical quotes. Given the reason behind it, they'll produce different approaches, and the differences are what you're really choosing between.
If you can't articulate what changed, that's worth knowing before you go to market. It usually means the project isn't ready yet.
Say who the site is for, in order
Almost every brief we receive says the audience is customers, partners, and potential employees. Almost none of them say which matters most when they conflict, and they will conflict, on the homepage, in the navigation, and in every decision after that.
Rank them. If the site has to choose, who wins? A brief that answers this saves weeks, because otherwise that argument happens midway through design when it's expensive.
It's also fine to say you don't know and want help working it out. Just say that explicitly rather than leaving it implied.
Give a budget range
Withholding the budget is common and it works against you. The usual reasoning is that studios will quote to the number rather than to the work. In practice what happens is you get proposals scoped for wildly different projects and no way to compare them.
A range is enough. Fifteen to twenty-five thousand tells a studio whether to propose a focused redesign or a full programme, and lets them tell you honestly if what you want isn't achievable at that level. That's a more useful conversation than discovering it in week six.
If you genuinely don't know what's reasonable, say so and ask two or three studios what a project like yours usually costs. Most will tell you.
Be honest about your own capacity
The most common cause of a website project running late is not the studio. It's that the people who need to approve things are busy running the company, and content that was promised for week three arrives in week nine.
Say who the decision-maker is, how often they're available, and who is writing the content. If nobody internally has time to write, say that, because it changes the scope and the price considerably.
Mention the constraints that will bite. A board that meets monthly. A trade show the site has to be live for. A quiet season when nobody will be available. These shape the plan far more than any design preference.
Say what you don't want
If a previous project went badly, describe what went wrong. Not to complain, but because it tells a studio what to avoid and how you like to work. Every studio worth talking to will want to know.
Include anything that's off the table. A platform you won't move off. A brand you can't change. Photography you're stuck with for a year. Constraints make a brief more useful, not less.
It's also worth naming what you don't need. If you're certain you don't want an ecommerce function or a blog, saying so removes a chunk of speculative scope from every quote.
What to ask for back
Ask for their approach, not just a price. How would they start? What would they want to know in the first two weeks? What do they think the risk is? The answers tell you a great deal about whether they've understood the problem.
Ask who would actually do the work and how much of their time you'd get. This is where the difference between studios is largest and where briefs are usually silent.
Ask for two or three references you can phone, ideally from projects that had some difficulty in them. Any studio can supply a happy client from a project that went smoothly.