Hiring
How to write a brief for a web developer
State what the site must achieve, who it is for, what content exists, what must integrate, and how success will be measured. A brief describing outcomes gets comparable quotes; one describing pages gets guesses.
Before you start
- Clarity about what the site is for
- An inventory of existing content and systems
The steps
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Step 1: State the business outcome
More enquiries, online sales, fewer phone calls. This is the single most important line.
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Step 2: Describe the audience
Who buys, what they need to know, what stops them.
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Step 3: List required functionality
Forms, payments, booking, accounts, multilingual. Separate must-have from nice-to-have explicitly.
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Step 4: Inventory your content
What exists, what needs writing, who writes it. Content is the most common cause of overrun.
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Step 5: List integrations
Payment gateway, CRM, accounting, email. Name the actual products.
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Step 6: State constraints
Budget range, deadline and why, brand guidelines, hosting requirements.
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Step 7: Define success
How you will know it worked, three months after launch.
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Step 8: Ask for what you need in return
Timeline, what you must supply, what happens after launch, and who owns what.
Give a budget range
Withholding it does not get a better price; it gets quotes for different projects that cannot be compared. A range lets each developer propose the best version of the work at that level, which is what you actually want to compare.
The section most briefs omit
What happens after launch. Who hosts it, who updates it, what it costs monthly, and what happens if you want to leave. A brief that asks this filters out anyone planning to make leaving difficult.
The background behind this
How to hire a web developer: measure the work, not the pitch covers the reasoning in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.