Working with a web design agency: how to brief them properly.

A proper brief tells a web design agency three things: what your business does, who it is for, and what the new site has to achieve in plain numbers. Get those three down on one page and you have done more than most clients ever do. Skip them and you will pay for a beautiful site that brings you no work.

I have sat on both sides of this. I have hired agencies, and I have cleaned up after agencies. The pattern almost never changes. When a project goes sideways, the root cause is rarely the agency's skill. It is the brief. The client could not say what they wanted, so the agency guessed, and the guess cost everyone three rounds of revisions and a launch date that slipped two months.

A brief is not paperwork. It is the contract between what you imagine and what you get. Here is how to write one that holds.

What does a web design agency actually need from you?

A web design agency needs your business goals, your audience, your content, and your constraints — in that order. Most clients lead with the look. They send screenshots of sites they like and say "something like this." That tells the agency your taste. It tells them nothing about what the site has to do for you.

Start with the goal in a single sentence. "I want this site to bring in five qualified consultation requests a month from people in San Diego searching for estate planning." That sentence does more work than ten pages of mood boards. It tells the designer what the homepage must point at, what the calls to action say, and what counts as success.

Then give them the audience. Who is the person you want to call you? What are they worried about when they land on the page? A family-law client searching at 11pm is anxious and short on patience. A business owner comparing accountants is methodical and skeptical. Those two people need different pages. The agency cannot know this unless you tell them.

Then content. This is where most projects stall. The agency builds the frame, then waits weeks for you to write the words. Decide upfront who writes the copy — you, them, or a writer they bring in — and put a date on it.

Last, constraints. Budget, deadline, and the things that cannot change. Your logo, your brand colors, the booking tool you already pay for, the practice-management software the site has to talk to. Name them now, not in week six.

How specific should the brief be?

The brief should be specific about outcomes and loose about execution. You hired the agency for design judgment. If you dictate every pixel, you have paid expert rates for a typist. But if you leave the outcome vague, they will optimize for the wrong thing — usually whatever looks good in their portfolio.

Here is the line. Be precise about what the site must achieve and who it serves. Be open about how they get there. "The contact form has to be visible without scrolling on a phone" is a good instruction. "Use a blue button at 240 pixels wide" is not your job.

Write down the pages you need and what each one is for. A typical professional-services site needs a homepage, a services page per practice area, an about page, a contact page, and a place for proof — reviews, results, case studies. For each page, write one line: what does the visitor do next? If you cannot answer that, the page does not earn its place.

Include the things you do not want too. "No stock photos of handshakes." "No carousel on the homepage." "No pop-up before the visitor has read anything." Refusals are as useful as requests. They save revision rounds.

And give examples, but explain why. Don't just send three sites you like. Say what you like about each one. "This site's services page is clear — I know in five seconds what they do and who for." That tells the agency the principle, not the surface.

Who owns SEO in a web design project?

Someone has to own SEO before the build starts, and it is almost never the web design agency by default. This is the gap that sinks more projects than any other. The agency builds a site that looks right and reads well, then it launches, and the phone does not ring. Why? Because nobody briefed the structure, the page titles, the URLs, or the redirects from the old site.

A pretty site that no one finds is a brochure you printed once and left in a drawer. If search visibility matters to you — and for most professional and local businesses it is the whole game — name it in the brief as a requirement, not a hope.

Get specific. Tell the agency which searches you want to show up for. "People searching 'immigration lawyer San Diego'" is a brief. The agency then knows you need a page built around that term, with the right heading, the right URL, and content that answers what that searcher wants. Without it, they will build a single "Services" page that ranks for nothing.

The biggest technical trap is migration. When you replace an old site, every old page that ranked needs to redirect to its new home. Miss this and you can lose years of search standing in a single afternoon. Put it in the brief in writing: "All existing URLs must be mapped and redirected on launch." If the agency does not know what you mean, that tells you something.

This is the kind of oversight a Fractional CMO handles — sitting between you and the agency, holding them to the parts that affect revenue, not just the parts that affect looks. We've written before about the difference between hiring a fractional CMO and hiring an agency, and project oversight is one of the clearest cases for it. You don't need a marketing department. You need one person who reads the brief, checks the work against it, and asks the questions you don't know to ask.

What does a good brief look like on one page?

A good brief fits on one page and a child could read it. Length is not depth. The clearest brief I have seen was eleven lines. Here is the shape.

1. The goal. One sentence. What the site must do for the business, in numbers if you can.
2. The audience. Who you want to call you, and what they are worried about.
3. The pages. A short list, each with one line on its job.
4. The searches. The terms you want to be found for.
5. Who writes the words. And by when.
6. The must-keeps. Brand, tools, integrations, anything that cannot change.
7. The must-nots. Your refusals.
8. Budget and deadline. Real numbers and a real date.
9. Who decides. One named person with final sign-off.

That last line matters more than it looks. Projects die when three partners each have opinions and none has the final word. Name one decision-maker. Tell the agency that is the only voice that approves. Internal politics are not the agency's problem to manage, and when they try to, it costs you money.

When we worked with McShanes Solicitors, the work that moved the numbers was not flashy design. It was structure, clear pages built around what people actually searched, and a single line of accountability. The brief did the heavy lifting before anyone opened a design tool.

How do you keep the project on track after the brief?

You keep a project on track by checking the work against the brief at every stage, not just at the end. The brief is not a document you write and file. It is the ruler you measure against. When the agency shows you a homepage, the question is not "do I like it." The question is "does this do what the brief said."

Set review points before the build starts. There should be one after the sitemap, one after the first page design, and one before launch. At each, you compare against the brief. If the design is gorgeous but the contact form is buried, the brief wins. If the copy reads well but ignores the searches you named, the brief wins. This keeps revisions cheap, because you catch the drift early instead of at the end when everything is built on it.

Watch for scope creep in both directions. Agencies add things; clients add things more. Every "could we also" has a cost in time and money. That is fine if you decide it is worth it. It is a problem when it happens by accident and the deadline slips and nobody knows why. Track changes against the original brief so you always know what moved.

And before you sign off, run the launch checklist. Does it load fast on a phone. Do the forms send to the right inbox. Are the old URLs redirected. Can you edit it yourself without calling them. These are not nice-to-haves. They are the difference between a site that works and a site you have to phone someone to fix.

If you are still deciding whether you need outside help to run this at all, it is worth reading when you actually need a fractional CMO and when you don't before you commit to anyone.

Where this breaks down

A brief cannot fix a bad agency, and it cannot fix a business that does not know what it wants. If you change your mind every week, no document will save the project. And a brief built only around looks — with no goal and no search terms — will still get you a site that wins design awards and loses clients. The brief works when it is honest about outcomes. If you cannot say what success looks like in numbers, fix that first, before you brief anyone.