How to write a brief that gets you an accurate quote
A vague brief does not get you a cheap quote. It gets you a padded one, or a cheap one that grows. Here is what to write down so the number you are given means something.
Contents
When a brief is thin, every studio reading it does the same thing: assumes the worst case, prices for it, and adds a margin for the parts that are unclear. You pay for that uncertainty. Alternatively you get a low quote from someone who assumed the best case, and the difference appears later as a series of variations.
A good brief is not long. Two pages is usually plenty. It just has to answer the questions a quote actually depends on.
Start with the outcome, not the website
Write down what has to be true for this project to have been worth doing. More enquiries of a particular kind. Fewer phone calls asking the same question. The ability to update prices without calling anyone. A store that does not fall over in the busy month.
This one paragraph is the most useful thing in a brief, because it lets whoever is quoting tell you when part of your own request does not serve it. If nobody can challenge the scope, nobody can save you money.
Say who it is for
Describe the people who will use the site, in plain terms. What they are trying to do, what they already know, what would make them leave. If there is more than one audience, say which matters most, because designs that serve everyone equally serve nobody particularly.
If you know how people currently find you and what they ask when they get in touch, include that. It is more useful than any persona document.
List the pages and, more importantly, the page types
A page count on its own tells a studio very little. What drives effort is how many distinct layouts are needed. Ten team profiles are one page type. A home page, a service page, a case study, a blog article and a contact page are five.
Write the sitemap as a simple indented list and mark which entries share a layout. This single exercise removes more estimating guesswork than anything else you can do.
Be honest about content
This is where projects go wrong, so it is worth being blunt with yourself.
- Does the copy exist? Is it good, or is it the old site’s copy that everyone quietly dislikes?
- Who is writing anything new, and do they have the time in the period the project runs?
- Do you have photography you own the rights to, or does that need arranging?
- For a store, does the product data exist in a clean, exportable form, including images, variants and descriptions?
- Who signs content off, and how long does that person usually take?
If the answer to most of these is uncertain, say so. A studio that knows content is a risk can plan around it. One that discovers it in week four cannot.
Name every system it has to connect to
List each one, what it is called, and what needs to happen. Payments, bookings, accounting, stock, CRM, email marketing, a membership system, an internal tool. For each, note whether you have administrative access and whether anyone still supports it.
Integrations are the most common source of a quote being wrong, because from the outside they all sound equally simple and from the inside they differ by an order of magnitude.
Say what you are keeping
Existing domain, hosting, brand, logo, content system, URL structure. Constraints are useful. A brief that says the brand is fixed and the hosting cannot move is easier to quote accurately than one that leaves both open, and it prevents a proposal built on changing things you have no intention of changing.
If there are things you actively do not want, write those down too. Every studio has house habits, and it is cheaper to rule them out in the brief than in the second round of designs.
Give a budget range and a real deadline
Withholding the budget feels like negotiating leverage. It is not. It means every proposal you receive is a guess at what you can afford, and you will spend a round of conversations discovering that three of the four are irrelevant.
A range is enough. So is saying what you are not prepared to exceed. And if there is a real date, say why it is real: a trade show, a season, a contract ending. A deadline with a reason gets planned around. A deadline without one gets treated as a preference.
Say who decides
Name the person with final approval and the people who must be consulted. Projects slow down in the gap between those two groups more than anywhere else. If sign off requires a committee that meets monthly, that fact belongs in the brief, because it changes the schedule and therefore the cost.
What you get back
A brief with these answers gets you quotes that are comparable, which is the real prize. When three proposals are priced against the same understanding, the differences between them are meaningful, and you can judge approach rather than guessing at what each one silently excluded.
It also gets you a better project. Most of what makes a brief useful for pricing is the same thinking that makes the site good, which is why we are happy to help write one before there is any commitment to work together. If you send us two paragraphs, we will send back the questions. That part costs nothing.