Website Project Brief: What Studios Actually Look For

What should a website project brief actually do?

A website project brief has one job. It lets a team that has never met you understand why the site exists, and how everyone will know it worked. Everything else supports that.

It is not a spec. It is not a contract. It is the shared reference the whole project returns to when a decision gets hard.

The three questions behind every good brief

Strip away the templates and a useful brief answers three questions.

What is broken, or missing, in the business today? Who has to believe something new after visiting the site? And what will be measurably different six months after launch?

If those three answers are sharp, a good studio can fill in the rest with you. If they are vague, no amount of page lists will save the project.

What a brief should never try to do

The most common mistake is designing the site inside the document. "Hero video, three cards below, testimonials carousel, then a contact form."

You are paying a team for judgment. When the brief locks in the layout, you get your own first draft back, executed at a higher price.

Describe outcomes instead. "Visitors from enterprise companies need proof we have handled projects their size" is a brief. "Add a logo wall" is a layout.

How long should a website project brief be?

For most marketing sites, three to six pages is enough. Long enough to make decisions visible, short enough that a busy founder actually finishes reading it before the kickoff call.

Length is not a sign of rigor. The briefs that produce the widest gaps between proposals are usually the longest ones.

Why long briefs produce wild quotes

A long brief tends to list everything anyone in the company ever wanted. A blog, a resource hub, a client portal, a careers section, three languages.

Studios then have to guess what is essential. A careful studio prices all of it. A hungry one prices half and plans to charge the rest later. That is how a single document turns into quotes that differ fourfold.

The five-minute test

Here is how a studio actually reads your brief. We open it, look for the business problem, then the audience, then the deadline and the budget range. That is the first five minutes.

If those four things are easy to find, the rest of the document gets read carefully. If they are buried on page eight, under the brand history and the font preferences, the whole brief gets read with suspicion.

So put them on page one. A short summary block, before anything else, changes how every following page is received.

What to leave out

Cutting is part of writing a good brief. Three kinds of content almost always belong somewhere else.

The full company history can go. One paragraph on where the business is today, and where it is heading, does more work than ten pages of milestones.

Feature lists copied from a template can go too. If nobody on your team can say who would use a client portal next quarter, it is not a requirement yet. Park it in a "phase two" list at the end.

And internal politics should never appear in the document. If two departments disagree on the site's main audience, settle that before sending the brief. A studio cannot resolve a disagreement it can only read between the lines.

Interview your own stakeholders first

The fastest way to a short, sharp brief is to talk to the people who will approve the site before you write a word. Not in a group meeting. One by one.

Nielsen Norman Group (Stakeholder Interviews 101, 2022) recommends running these interviews as early as possible in a project. Its suggested discussion guide covers four topics: success metrics, priorities, history and expertise, and process and workflow.

Those four topics map almost exactly onto a good brief. Run the interviews, and half the document writes itself.

The requirements almost nobody puts in writing

Most templates cover pages, features and visual taste. Very few cover the requirements that decide whether the site still works well in three years.

You do not need to know how to meet them. You only need to state that they matter, so every proposal prices them in.

A performance budget

Sites get slow one "small" addition at a time. A background video here, a tracking script there, an animation library for one section.

The web keeps getting heavier. According to the HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025, Page Weight chapter), the median mobile home page weighed 2.6 MB in 2025, up 8.4% in a year. Images alone accounted for 911 KB of it.

Write a ceiling into the brief. Google publishes clear targets. According to Google Search Central (Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results, updated 2025), Largest Contentful Paint should land within 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint should stay under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.

On an animation-heavy site, these numbers become the referee between ambition and speed. That is exactly why they belong in writing.

An accessibility standard

Accessibility is a legal question as much as a design one. In the US, the Department of Justice (Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA, 2022) addresses businesses open to the public. Its position is that ADA requirements apply to all the goods and services they offer, including those on the web.

If you sell into Europe, there is a second layer. According to Travers Smith (A new milestone for accessibility, the European Accessibility Act now applies, 2025), the act can be enforced from June 28, 2025, and covers e-commerce services. Microenterprises under ten employees and €2 million in turnover are exempt from some requirements.

The baseline is poor almost everywhere. According to WebAIM (The WebAIM Million, 2025), 94.8% of the top one million home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures.

So name a target, usually WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and ask for it to be tested before launch. Your lawyer can tell you how much exposure you actually carry. Our guide to website accessibility compliance explains what to ask for.

Readability by AI crawlers

This one is new, and it is missing from every template on the first page of Google. A growing share of buyers now meet brands through ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity before they ever see a search result.

Those tools do not read pages the way a browser does. According to Vercel (The rise of the AI crawler, 2024), none of the major AI crawlers it measured render JavaScript, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The requirement is one sentence. Headlines, body copy and key facts must be present in the HTML the server sends. Motion and interactivity can sit on top, as long as they never hide the substance.

Who owns the code and the design

Many US clients assume that paying for a website means owning it. The law is less generous than that.

According to the U.S. Copyright Office (Circular 30, Works Made for Hire), a commissioned work only counts as made for hire if it falls into one of nine specific categories. It also needs a written agreement, signed by all parties, saying so. A custom website rarely fits those categories cleanly.

That is why most agreements use a written assignment of rights instead. Your brief should state the expectation: full assignment, or a license, and for which uses. The contract and your lawyer handle the wording. The point is to raise it before the proposal, not during a dispute.

Ask for one more thing at handoff: a list of the third-party pieces inside the site. Fonts, code libraries, plugins, stock images. Each comes with its own license, and you inherit those terms the day you launch.

Your team's independence after launch

Last, say who will change what once the site is live. Case studies, job posts, press mentions, translations.

That single paragraph tells a studio more about the right content management system than naming one ever could.

When your brand came from another agency

This situation is more common than most guides admit. A branding agency rebuilt your identity. Now a different team has to build the website. The brief becomes a handoff document, and handoffs are where intent gets lost.

The Apax project

The Apax project is a clean example. Apax is a Paris architecture practice founded in 1982. According to the project page, Antoine Morizot took over the firm in 2025 with the aim of modernizing its positioning.

The identity and naming were redesigned by another agency, Graphéine. Metabole Studio then designed a website meant to extend that new identity and carry the repositioning. The stated goal was to move Apax from a traditional perception to a more contemporary, confident and selective practice.

A brief for that kind of project cannot stop at "here is the new logo." The website team needs to understand the strategic shift the identity was built to express. Otherwise the site ends up decorated with the brand instead of driven by it.

What to hand over beyond the logo

A strong handoff brief includes the brand strategy behind the identity, not just the assets. Who the rebrand was meant to win over. What it was meant to leave behind. Which rules are strict and which can flex on screen.

Typography licensing deserves its own line. A typeface licensed for print is not automatically licensed for the web. Finding that out during development costs time and sometimes money.

Finally, ask the branding agency for a short call with the web team. Thirty minutes between the two studios prevents weeks of reverse-engineering.

Questions to ask the branding agency first

Before you brief the web team, get written answers to a few questions from whoever built the identity.

• Which elements of the identity are fixed, and which were designed to adapt?
• Were motion, sound or interaction ever explored for the brand?
• Which typefaces are licensed for web use, and under whose account?
• What did the brand deliberately move away from, and why?

The last question matters most. A website can undo a repositioning in a single hero section if the team does not know what the old brand looked like. Knowing what to avoid is often more useful than knowing what to copy.

Three habits that quietly ruin a brief

None of these habits look like mistakes from the inside. That is what makes them expensive.

Writing for approval instead of for the studio

A brief often doubles as an internal document that leadership has to sign off on. So it fills up with reassuring language. "Best-in-class user experience." "A site that reflects our values."

What we see again and again is that these phrases survive every internal review precisely because nobody can disagree with them. They also give a studio nothing to work with. Replace each one with a sentence a stranger could check.

Listing competitors without saying why

"Our competitors are X, Y and Z" is not a brief. It is a homework assignment for the studio.

The first thing we usually hear on a kickoff call is "we want something like this competitor's site." It is a reasonable instinct, because it feels like a shortcut. In practice, that site was built for another company, another audience, another moment. Say what you admire in it, and why it matters to your buyers.

Leaving content ownership blank

Content is where schedules die. Not code.

A pattern we see often in growing companies: everyone assumes marketing will write the copy, and marketing assumes the studio will. Designs sit waiting for words. Launch slips by a month, and nobody can point to the moment it went wrong. Give content its own owner and its own deadline in the brief.

Expert view

Should you share your budget in the brief?

Yes. A budget range is the single most useful number in a website project brief. It turns proposals from guesses into options you can compare.

What happens when the range is missing

Without a range, each studio imagines a different project. One assumes you want the full vision. Another assumes you want the leanest version that ships. You get quotes that cannot be compared, and you end up choosing on price alone.

With a range, a good studio tells you what fits inside it, what does not, and what could move to a second phase.

What a custom site costs

For a truly custom marketing site, expect a starting range of €8,000 to €10,000. Premium sites typically start around €15,000. Our breakdown of custom website cost walks through what drives those numbers.

A short pre-flight checklist

Before you send the brief, check that page one answers these points.

• The business problem the site must solve, in two sentences.
• The primary audience, and the one thing they must believe after visiting.
• The launch date that matters, and why it matters.
• The budget range, even if it is wide.
• How success will be measured six months after launch.

If an existing site has usability problems you can feel but not name, a UX audit before the brief gives you evidence instead of opinions.

Write the brief you would want to receive

A website project brief is not a description of a website. It is a description of a decision, written for people who have not been in your meetings.

Get the problem, the audience and the finish line onto page one. Add the requirements nobody else writes down: performance, accessibility, AI readability, ownership. If your brand came from another team, hand over its reasoning along with its files.

Do that, and the proposals you get back will finally be comparable. To see how those requirements turn into actual engineering choices, our piece on custom web development picks up where the brief leaves off.

The studio you choose will read your brief in five minutes. Make sure those five minutes show your ambition, not just your sitemap.

Your most common questions about a website project brief

How is a brief different from an RFP?

An RFP is a formal procurement document, usually sent to several vendors with fixed response rules and scoring criteria. A website project brief is lighter and more strategic. It explains the problem and the goals so a studio can propose an approach. Many companies send the brief first, shortlist two or three studios, and only then move to a formal proposal stage.

Should the brief include a sitemap?

Include your current sitemap if you have a site, because it shows what exists and what performs. Avoid prescribing the new one. A studio should propose the future information architecture based on your goals and audience. If certain pages are non-negotiable for legal or sales reasons, list them and say why. The same logic applies to choosing between a custom website or a template: state the need, not the answer.

Who on our team should own the brief?

One person, with real authority to make trade-offs. Usually that is a founder, a marketing lead or a head of brand. Committees can contribute input, but a single decision owner keeps the brief coherent and speeds up approvals. When nobody owns it, the document grows by addition, and every proposal gets harder to compare.

Can a studio write the brief for us?

Yes, often as a paid discovery or scoping phase. That can work well, especially for complex projects. Make sure the resulting document belongs to you and is portable to another vendor. You should be able to take the discovery output elsewhere if the fit is wrong. Otherwise the scoping fee quietly locks you in.

Does it matter if the studio is overseas?

It changes logistics more than quality. Put time zones, meeting cadence and your preferred language for written feedback in the brief. Clarify the currency of the quote and who handles any local legal requirements, such as accessibility rules in your market. A studio that has shipped international work will raise these points itself. If it does not, ask.

What should we send along with the brief?

Send whatever saves the studio from guessing. Brand guidelines and font licenses, analytics access or a recent traffic export, and examples of sites you admire with a line on why. Add any sales materials your team uses today. Pitch decks and proposals often reveal how you really sell better than any brand book does.

About the author

Alan Chevereau is an SEO consultant. He works with Metabole Studio on content strategy and organic visibility, in France and internationally.