The Small Business Website Brief

Why a brief is the cheapest thing you will do

Website projects rarely go wrong at the design stage. They go wrong because the business and the builder had different pictures in their heads on day one, and neither picture was written down. The brief is the document that prevents this. It takes an afternoon, it makes competing quotes genuinely comparable, and it removes almost every argument that happens in month two.

You do not need a designer to write it. You need to answer eleven questions honestly.

1. What is the site for?

Pick one primary job. Get more phone calls. Take online bookings. Sell wholesale to trade customers. Recruit staff. A site can do several things, but it can only be optimised for one, and if you do not choose, the builder will choose for you. Write it as a sentence: the main job of this site is to get boiler replacement enquiries from homeowners in three named towns.

2. Who is the visitor?

Describe two real people, not personas. The customer you had last Tuesday and the customer you wish you had more of. What did they search for? What were they worried about? What did they ask on the phone before they booked? Those questions are what the site has to answer.

3. What does success look like in numbers?

If you cannot say, the project cannot be judged. Thirty enquiries a month instead of eleven is a target. A more professional image is not. Write down the current number even if it is embarrassing, because it is the only baseline you will get.

4. The page list

Write every page the site will have. Most service businesses need between seven and twelve. For each one, note in a single line what that page is for. If you cannot write that line, the page probably should not exist. This list is the main driver of the price, and it is where quotes differ most.

5. Who is writing the words?

This is the question that delays more projects than any other. Copy is either written by you, written by the builder, or the project stalls. If you are writing it, block time in the calendar now and set a date. If they are writing it, check whether it is in the quote and how many rounds of changes you get.

6. Where are the photographs coming from?

Three honest options: you have good photographs, you are paying for a shoot, or the site is being designed to work without photography. All three are fine. What is not fine is discovering in week five that the only pictures available are twelve dark phone snaps of a van. Decide now, because it changes the design.

7. What has to be integrated?

List every system the site must talk to: your booking software, your CRM, a payment processor, an inventory system, a review widget, an email platform. Each integration is real work and each one is a source of surprise cost. Name them in the brief and the quote will include them.

8. Who maintains it after launch?

Someone has to install updates, renew the domain, keep backups and fix things when a plugin breaks. If that is not written down, the answer defaults to nobody, and a site with nobody maintaining it becomes a security problem within about eighteen months. Ask what is included, what it costs monthly, and what the response time is.

9. What do you own at the end?

Ask explicitly: do I own the domain, the hosting account, the design source files, the content, and the right to move the site to another provider? Get the answer in writing. A surprising number of small businesses discover at the point of leaving that their domain is registered to their web designer.

10. Accessibility and legal basics

The site needs a privacy policy, a cookie notice if you use analytics or advertising pixels, and it should be usable with a keyboard and a screen reader. In several jurisdictions this is a legal requirement rather than a nicety. Put it in the brief so it is quoted rather than added later.

11. The timeline and the decision-maker

Name one person in your business who approves things. Projects with two decision-makers take twice as long; projects with three do not finish. Then set a realistic date. A seven-page site with copy written by the builder takes six to ten weeks in practice, and anyone promising two weeks is either very good or not planning to write anything.

How to compare the quotes you get back

• Normalise the page count. A cheaper quote for five pages is not cheaper than a dearer one for eleven.
• Check who writes the copy. This is often the whole difference in price.
• Check the number of revision rounds. Two is normal; unlimited is a fiction that gets recovered elsewhere.
• Check what happens after launch. Hosting, maintenance, and the hourly rate for changes.
• Ask for two sites they built two years ago. Anyone can show you last month's work. You want to see what a site looks like once the client has been living in it.

Bring the finished brief to every conversation. It will shorten the process by weeks, and the quality of the questions you get asked about it will tell you a great deal about who you are hiring.