How to write a brief for your website in fifteen minutes
Six questions, answered in your own words. The brief shapes the first version, so this is the highest-return quarter hour of the whole process.
The most common way a first version disappoints is a brief that describes the business in adjectives. "Premium", "trusted", "quality service since 2011". None of that tells anybody what to put on the page.
Answer these six instead, in the words you would use talking to a new employee.
1. What do you sell, specifically?
Not "bakery products". "Cakes to order, everyday pastries, bread in the morning, and savoury snacks after 4pm." The specifics become the sections.
2. Who buys it?
Families in the neighbourhood? Offices ordering in bulk? Brides? Each of those wants a different first screen, and if you do not say, you get an average of all three.
3. What is the one thing you want a visitor to do?
Ring you. Book a table. Send an enquiry with a date. Place an order. Pick one. Everything else on the page arranges itself around it, and a page with four equal priorities has none.
4. What do people always ask before buying?
Price, timings, delivery area, whether you do eggless, how far in advance to order. These are your page. Every question you answer there is a phone call you do not take and a customer who does not drift to somebody clearer.
5. What should it not say?
The dish you no longer make. The old branch. The rate you have outgrown. Naming these is faster than fixing them later.
6. Anything you already have?
Photographs, a logo, a price list on paper, an Instagram worth linking. Say so.
Two things worth knowing about how the brief is used
The whole thing is read on the first message, because that is when it decides what gets built. Afterwards only its opening is carried along, which is what keeps every later change cheap — so anything crucial belongs near the top.
And there is a length limit, four thousand words, which is far more than this exercise needs. A longer document is kept whole and downloadable, and you are told which part was read. Being quietly given four thousand words of somebody’s seventeen thousand while they believe otherwise is a failure we designed against.
Fifteen minutes on those six questions is worth more than a week of adjustments afterwards.
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