The most common reason website projects drag on, go over budget, or produce results the client isn't happy with isn't design incompetence. It's communication failure at the start, a brief so vague that the designer had to make dozens of assumptions about what the client wanted, and those assumptions didn't match the client's unstated expectations. The client is disappointed; the designer is confused about why; both parties spend more time than they should have on revisions that would have been unnecessary with a clearer starting point.
A good design brief takes one to two hours to write. It saves weeks of rework and gives you genuine leverage in holding your design team accountable for delivering what was agreed. Here's what to include.
Start With the Problem, Not the Solution
The worst briefs start with "I want a website that looks like..." and proceed to describe visual preferences. The best briefs start with "Here's the business problem we need the website to solve."
What problem is the website supposed to solve? Some examples of well-defined problems: "We get plenty of referral business but we lose potential clients at the website stage, they visit, see an outdated site, and either don't contact us or choose a competitor who looks more established." Or: "We have no online presence and we're missing out on the customers who search Google before calling anyone." Or: "Our current website doesn't explain what we do clearly enough, we get too many unqualified inquiries from people who aren't a fit for our services."
Each of those problems implies a different website solution. The first needs social proof and a modern design that signals quality. The second needs search engine optimization built into the design from the start. The third needs clearer messaging and a more intentional qualification process. Telling your designer which problem applies makes it possible for them to design the right solution, not just a pretty one.
Define Your Audience Specifically
Designers and copywriters make dramatically better decisions when they know exactly who they're designing for. "Small business owners in Houston" is too vague. "Houston residential service contractors, plumbers, electricians, HVAC companies, typically 3-15 employees, who are technically skilled but not marketing-sophisticated, and who are comparing three or four agencies before making a decision" is specific enough to design for.
Include: who your typical client is, what they care about most when they're choosing a provider like you, what objections they typically have before they decide to work with you, and what questions they're trying to get answered when they visit your website. If you have existing client reviews, pull phrases directly from them, "reliable," "responsive," "didn't oversell us", those are the actual words your audience uses to evaluate providers, and they should appear in the design's messaging.
Gather Your Examples, and Be Specific About What You Like
Most clients say "I like these sites" without explaining what specifically they like about them. The designer looks at the same sites and notices completely different things. Being specific removes the ambiguity.
Instead of "I like the Acme Co. website," try: "I like the Acme Co. website because the photography feels real rather than stock, the navigation is simple with five items and nothing buried in dropdowns, and the color palette is professional without being corporate or cold." Now the designer knows exactly which attributes to carry forward and which are irrelevant.
Also collect examples of what you don't want. "This competitor's website feels too corporate, too much blue, the stock photos of handshakes bother me, and the service descriptions are so generic they could apply to anyone." That negative example is at least as useful as the positive ones, because it tells your designer where the guardrails are.
Three to five example websites with specific notes about what you like and don't like is the right amount. More than that creates conflicting signals that are hard to synthesize. Less than that doesn't give the designer enough to work with.
Define What Success Looks Like, in Measurable Terms
Your brief should specify what you'll use to decide whether the project was a success. Vague goals like "look more professional" or "better online presence" can't be measured, which means you'll never know if the project achieved them, and your designer has no objective standard to design toward.
Measurable success criteria for a website redesign: "We currently get 3-5 website contact form submissions per month. After the redesign, we want to see 10-15." Or: "Our Google PageSpeed score on mobile is currently 42. We want the new site to score above 85." Or: "We want to rank on page one of Google for 'web design agency Houston' within 12 months of launch."
These are targets, not guarantees. But having them in the brief gives both sides something to design toward and a concrete way to evaluate the outcome. Designers who are given measurable goals design more strategically than designers who are given only aesthetic direction.
Practical Information the Designer Needs
Beyond the strategic context, your brief should include the practical details your design team needs to plan the project:
Pages and content: What pages does the site need? Homepage, Services (how many?), About, Contact, Blog, what else? What content exists that can be reused, and what needs to be created from scratch? Who is responsible for writing copy, you or the agency?
Integrations: What tools does the website need to connect to? Your customer management system? A booking tool? A chat widget? An email marketing platform? Each integration adds complexity and cost, so listing them upfront prevents surprises.
Timeline: When does the site need to be live, and why? "We have a trade show in March" is different from "we'd like this done in Q1 if possible." Hard deadlines with context help designers allocate resources appropriately and warn you early if the timeline is unrealistic.
Budget: State your actual budget. Many business owners are reluctant to share their budget because they fear being "scoped up" to it. The reality is the opposite: knowing your budget helps a designer tell you what's realistically achievable within it, rather than designing something amazing that can't be built for what you can spend. A designer who finds out your budget after spending three weeks on a proposal that's three times what you can afford has wasted everyone's time.
A well-written brief takes the guesswork out of the project for your design team and gives you a document you can hold them to. If you're starting a website project in Houston and want to talk through what should go into your brief, or want us to ask you the right questions to build one together, reach out at hello@d8.digital.
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