We've already written about the seven questions any agency must ask before work starts. This post goes one level down and gets concrete: you get a ready-made brief template for a website, section by section. Fill it in once and you cut weeks off the project — because the agency starts designing instead of guessing.
A brief isn't a formality. It's where you decide how many times you'll pay for the same thing. A weak brief doesn't stop the project — it pushes the cost to later, when changes are more expensive. A good brief turns three rounds of guesswork into one conversation about specifics.
Why a good brief saves weeks and money
Every gap in a brief gets filled by someone eventually — except it's the agency that fills it, on your money, at the stage where reversing a decision costs the most. No goal means a site you can't evaluate. No audience means copy written "for everyone", which is copy for no one. No feature list means a quote that drifts halfway through. An hour spent on the brief saves a week of revisions — that's not a metaphor, it's a real exchange rate.
The brief template, section by section
Nine sections below. You don't need an essay in any of them — two or three concrete sentences per point is enough.
- Business goal of the site — why this site exists. Not "we want to be online", but: generate B2B leads, sell a course, book consultations, build credibility before a round. One main thing the site must deliver — and how you'll know it did.
- Target audience — who lands here and at what moment. Persona, not demographics: "an operations director at a manufacturing company looking for a supplier because the last one failed" says a hundred times more than "SME companies".
- The action you expect from the user — what exactly they should do on the site. Submit a form, book a call, download an offer, buy. One main action per page. If you have five equal ones, you have none.
- Competitors and references — three to five sites: competitors, plus ones you like. Always with a reason. "I like this one because you immediately see what they offer and what it costs" is a signal. "Because it's pretty" is noise.
- Content — who writes it — the most commonly skipped section, and the one that slips deadlines the most. Do you have ready text, photos, product descriptions? Are copy and information architecture on the agency? Say it outright — a design built on placeholder text has to be reworked across half its sections later.
- Must-have vs nice-to-have features — split them into two lists. Must-haves are things the site makes no sense without (a form, multilingual support, a blog). Nice-to-haves are things we add if budget and time allow. Without that split, everything is a priority, which means nothing is.
- Integrations — what the site must connect to: CRM, booking system, payments, newsletter, analytics, marketing automation. This is the most common source of hidden costs when it surfaces only mid-build.
- Budget and timeline — even a rough range. "Open budget" is worse than a number, because it forces the agency to guess and it will either overshoot or under-scope. Give a real date too, and the reason if it's hard (a trade show, a product launch, year-end).
- Who decides on your side — one person, two, a board at the end? Who signs off on mockups, and who can veto them at the last minute. That single fact turns a realistic timeline into fiction or the other way around.
The most common gaps in client briefs
- A goal written as a wish list — "modern, clean, standout" are adjectives, not a goal. The goal is what should happen on the user's side.
- No word on who writes the content — the project kicks off, and two weeks in it turns out nobody has the text. This is where the most time disappears.
- A hidden decision-maker — sign-offs went smoothly until, in the final week, a CEO who never saw the brief steps in and reverses half the decisions.
- "Open budget" — see above. It's not flexibility, it's shifting risk to the agency, which comes back to you in the quote anyway.
What we do NOT need in the brief
What you leave out is worth as much as what you put in. Don't design it for us:
- A finished layout or mockups — the arrangement of sections is our job. You give the goal, the action and the content; the layout is work we take responsibility for.
- Specific technologies, unless you have a hard reason — "it must be on WordPress" with no rationale can lock in a solution worse than the problem. Tell us what the site should do; leave the stack to us.
- Finished button and headline copy — conversion copy is part of our work, not your homework. It's enough to tell us what's true about the product.
The exception: if something is a hard constraint (it must stay on the current CRM, it must work with the existing booking system, the law requires a specific consent) — put it in. A constraint isn't the same as designing for the agency.
How a brief shapes the quote
A quote is a function of uncertainty. The less the agency guesses, the tighter and fairer the range it gives. A precise brief lets us price exactly the scope you need — without a buffer for "what if a CRM integration shows up" and without under-scoping that cracks halfway through. A vague brief forces one of two things: either the agency adds a risk margin (you pay for its uncertainty) or cuts scope to the minimum (you pay again after launch). That's the simple relationship we spelled out in the piece on how much a website costs: price rarely grows from code, almost always from unknowns.
The brief is the cheapest moment in a project to change your mind. Every week further on, the same change costs more.
How we start at Krowd
If you come with a filled-in template, the first call is 30 minutes of specifics, not us pulling the basics out of you. At Krowd Agency we work as an integrated team — strategy, copy, design and build in one place — so from one good brief we come back with a real scope, timeline and quote.
Don't have all the answers yet? That's normal — we find half of them together in a workshop. Describe the project as far as you know it through our contact form, and we'll fill in the rest together.