Hiring
Writing a website brief that gets you comparable quotes
A brief that produces accurate quotes answers four things: what the site must do, who does the content, what it must integrate with, and when it must launch. Every scope dispute I have seen traces back to one of those four being left implicit.
Why vague briefs cost you money
When a brief is ambiguous, suppliers do one of two things: quote high to cover the unknowns, or quote low and recover the difference through change requests. Both are rational responses to missing information, and both cost you more than writing another paragraph would have.
A clear brief also makes quotes comparable. Three quotes for three different interpretations of your project tell you nothing about price.
The ten sections
- Business context — what you sell, to whom, and what the site must achieve commercially
- Current situation — existing site, platform, hosting, what works and what does not
- Primary goal — one sentence: enquiries, online sales, bookings, credibility for outbound sales
- Must-have functionality — the features without which the project has failed
- Nice-to-have functionality — explicitly separated, so it can be cut without renegotiating
- Content — who writes copy, who supplies photography, and when it will exist
- Integrations — payment, accounting, CRM, dispatch, supplier feeds, anything with an API
- Design direction — two or three sites you like, and specifically what you like about them
- Timeline and any fixed date, with the reason for it
- Budget range — yes, actually state it
State the budget. Really.
The instinct to hide the budget in case a supplier "takes all of it" is understandable and counterproductive. Without a range, the supplier has to guess which of several very different projects you are asking for, and the guess is usually wrong in whichever direction is worse for you.
A range is enough: "in the region of $150 to $400". A good supplier will tell you if that is unrealistic for what you have described, which is more useful than a quote that quietly omits half the requirements.
The three ambiguities behind every scope dispute
- "Responsive"
- Everybody agrees it means it works on a phone. Nobody agrees whether it means designed for a phone or merely not broken on one. Say which.
- "SEO included"
- Ranges from a title tag per page to an ongoing content programme. Ask exactly what is delivered, and expect a list rather than a reassurance.
- "Content migration"
- Moving 40 pages of text is an afternoon. Moving 4,000 products with images and redirects is a project. State the number.
What to ask every supplier for
- A fixed-scope quote against your written brief, itemised
- Their definition of what is included after launch, and for how long
- Who owns the code, hosting, domain and payment accounts at the end — in writing
- Two live sites you can open and, ideally, a client you can contact
- What they would remove from your brief to reduce cost, and what they would add. The answer tells you whether they read it
Questions people ask about this
- How long should a brief be?
- Two pages is usually enough for a small business site. Longer is fine if the functionality is genuinely complex; padding it with company history is not.
- What if I do not know what I need technically?
- Then describe outcomes rather than solutions: "customers can book a slot and pay a deposit" instead of "I need a booking plugin". Specifying the solution before the problem is how projects end up with features nobody uses.
- Should I send the same brief to several suppliers?
- Yes, identically. That is the only way the quotes are comparable, and any supplier who resists a competitive process is telling you something useful.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.