How to Brief a Web Designer
Most disappointing website projects were disappointing before any design work started. The brief was a list of pages and a mood board, so the designer guessed at everything that mattered, and the guesses were revealed one revision round at a time.
A good brief is not long. It's specific about the right things.
What to include
Who this is for. Not "small businesses." A specific person with a specific problem, described the way you'd describe them to a colleague. "Practice managers at dental offices with two to six chairs, usually the person who also handles billing, generally short on time and sceptical of agencies."
What you want them to do. One primary action. Book, call, enquire, buy. If you list four, you've asked the designer to prioritize on your behalf and they'll pick differently than you would.
What is true about you that isn't true about competitors. The concrete version, not the values version. Twenty years. 8,000 sites. A support line answered in under an hour. This is the raw material for every headline on the site.
Where your customers actually come from. Referral, search, a partner, walk-ins. A site built for a referral audience (who already trust you and want to confirm) looks different from one built for cold search traffic (who need convincing).
Constraints, honestly. Budget range, deadline, who has approval, what platform you're staying on, brand elements that cannot change. Constraints given up front produce better work. Constraints revealed in round three produce rework.
Examples with reasons. "I like this site" is worth nothing. "I like how this one puts pricing right on the service page — our customers always ask and we always dodge it" is worth an hour of discussion.
What to leave out
Your layout. If you specify a three-column section with a slider above it, you've hired an expensive pair of hands rather than a designer. Describe the problem and let them solve it.
Adjectives. Clean, modern, professional, bold. Every brief contains these and no two people mean the same thing by any of them. Replace each one with an example.
Page counts as a proxy for scope. "About twelve pages" says nothing about the work. One page with a booking flow is a bigger project than nine text pages.
The two questions that fix most briefs
"What happens if this website works perfectly?" The answer is your success metric, and it's usually a number of enquiries rather than anything visual.
"What's the thing you're worried about?" Every client has one — a competitor's site, a previous bad experience, a stakeholder who'll object. Saying it out loud early is worth more than any other single sentence in the brief.
Length
One to two pages. If it's longer, it's probably specifying solutions. If it's shorter, it's probably missing the audience or the action.
Either way, the ten minutes spent making it specific will save a revision round — and revision rounds are where budgets and goodwill both go.