A brief is not a wish list. It's a translation device — your business, your goals, and your audience converted into something a designer can actually act on. Get the translation right and the first round of work lands close to the target. Get it wrong and you spend three rounds of revisions trying to explain what you meant in the first place.
The good news is that writing a brilliant brief takes about an hour, costs nothing, and saves both sides days of frustration. The trick is knowing what's worth including, what's worth being strict about, and what's worth deliberately leaving open.
Start with the business, not the website
The most common mistake is to open a brief with "I'd like a five-page website with a contact form, a blog, and an Instagram feed." That's a feature list, not a brief. It tells the designer what to build, but nothing about why, and the why is what determines every meaningful decision they'll make.
Open with the business. What do you actually do? Who buys it, and why? What changed in the last year that made you decide it was time for a new website? What are you trying to achieve in the next six to twelve months that this work is meant to support? Three or four sentences here are worth more than three pages of feature requests.
Name the audience — specifically
"Small businesses" is not an audience."Small businesses" is the size of a company. Who is the actual person reading the page? What's their job title? What stage of their problem are they at when they land on your site? Do they already know they need what you sell, or are they still figuring out the question?
The more specific you can be, the more confidently the designer can write copy, choose imagery, and pace the page. "Founders of UK consultancies who realised on Sunday night that their website is letting them down" is a brief."Anyone who needs marketing" is a vacuum.
Be ruthless about the goal
Pick the single most important thing the website needs to do. Not three things. One. Generate enquiries. Sell a digital product. Build authority before a sales call. Capture email addresses for a launch list. Whatever it is, write it at the top of the brief in plain English, and use it as the tiebreaker for every later decision.
If you can't pick one, it's worth pausing the project until you can. Not because you don't want all of those things — you do — but because a website that tries to do all of them at once does none of them well. Designers do their best work when they have a clear hierarchy. You are the only person who can give them that.
Show, don't describe
Three or four reference websites tell a designer more in five minutes than three pages of adjectives. Don't write "modern, clean, professional but with personality" — those words mean nothing because they mean different things to everyone. Send links. Even better, send links and a single sentence about what specifically you like in each one.
And include a "do not want this" reference too. Showing what you actively dislike — and being honest about why — narrows the target dramatically. Designers do not need every reference to be aspirational; they need to understand the shape of your taste.
What to leave deliberately open
The instinct of most clients is to over-specify, in the belief that more detail equals less risk. Often the opposite is true. Leaving the right things open — colour palette, exact layout, navigation labels — gives the designer room to do the work you're hiring them for. A brief that pre-decides every visual choice usually ends up with a website that looks like the inside of the client's head, which is rarely what was actually needed.
Be specific about goals, audience and constraints. Be loose about execution. That's the rule.
The boring bits that matter most
Two more things every brief needs and most briefs forget: a realistic budget and a realistic deadline. "We don't really have a number in mind" wastes weeks. So does "as soon as possible." A range is fine. "Between £2,500 and £4,000, ready to launch by mid-July, and we have an event on the eighteenth that depends on it" is a brief that any designer can plan around. (Not sure what a realistic budget looks like? Our packages start at £799.) It's also the brief that gets prioritised on a busy month.
Add who decides what gets approved (one person, ideally — committees are the death of momentum), what content already exists, and what content still needs to be written. The clearer the picture upfront, the smoother every subsequent week.