The one-page website brief I wish every owner sent before asking for a price

A website brief is one page that tells a designer what your business sells, what the site has to do, which pages and features it needs, who writes the words, and what you can spend. Write it before you ask anyone for a price. Without it, three designers quote three different websites, and you end up comparing a bicycle to a minivan.

Most first emails I get say some version of "I need a website, how much?" That's a fair question, and I can't answer it. It's like phoning a contractor and asking how much a renovation costs. Of what? A bathroom or the whole basement? So I ask ten questions back, the owner answers four, and we both lose a week. Below is the page that skips all of that. It's filled in for a made-up business, so you can see what a finished one looks like and copy the shape.

What does a website brief need to include?

Ten lines are enough: what you sell and where, the one job the site does, the pages, the features, who supplies words and photos, what exists today, sites you like, a budget range, a deadline, and who approves. Each line answers a question the designer would otherwise ask you by email, one at a time, over two weeks.

On my side of the desk, each of those lines answers a pricing question:

1. The business line tells me which pages earn money. Birch Lane's drain cleaning page gets more care than the About page, because that's where the phone calls come from.
2. "Get the phone to ring" changes the design. A site built for calls puts the number everywhere and keeps the form short. A site built to sell products is a different animal.
3. The page list is the single biggest driver of the price, so count them. If you're unsure, my guide on how many pages a website needs walks through it service by service.
4. Features are where surprise invoices come from. A photo upload on a form is small. Online payments or a booking calendar are not.
5. The words line is the one owners skip, and it's the one that stalls projects. Pages wait for text far more often than text waits for pages. The content and photo checklist tells you what to gather.
6. "What we have now" tells me whether there's a domain to keep, an email to protect and old pages that already rank. That changes the first week of work.

The last four lines (sites you like, budget, deadline, who decides) are covered further down, because each one has a trap of its own.

Which lines of the brief change the price?

The number of pages and three features: a blog, online booking and online payments. Design taste, colours and fonts barely move a fixed quote. Below is how a brief lands on my own packages, so you can see the mechanics with real numbers instead of "it depends".

The made-up Birch Lane brief has eight pages, a form and no booking, so it sits in the first row. That's why its budget line of $1,000 to $2,000 is useful: it tells me the owner has room for help with the text, which a lot of small sites need more than they need another page. Full details of what each package includes are on the pricing page, and every quote I send is fixed in writing before any work starts.

Should I tell a web designer my budget?

Yes, as a range. A designer who knows you have $1,500 proposes the best site for $1,500. One who doesn't know guesses, and guesses tend to land high, because quoting low and then adding extras is a reputation nobody wants. A range also screens out the designers who were never going to fit.

The fear behind hiding the budget is that the quote will magically match the top of the range. It happens. The fix isn't secrecy, it's a brief detailed enough that the quote has to itemise what you get. If you wrote "eight pages, one form, no booking" and someone quotes $5,000, you can ask which part of eight pages costs $5,000. A vague brief gives them no such corner to be held to.

Put two more money lines in while you're at it. Say whether you want a monthly plan after launch for updates and backups, and roughly what you'd pay for it. And say what you already pay for hosting and the domain, because a surprising number of owners are paying far more than they should for those, which I covered in the guide to hosting cart add-ons.

The sentences owners send, and what to write instead

These are the lines I see most often in first emails, next to the version a designer can actually price.

Notice that "SEO, of course" gets fixed by writing down services and places. That one line does more for your future rankings than any amount of keyword talk in a sales call, and it's free.

Does my brief need to mention accessibility rules in Ontario?

If your business or non-profit has 50 or more employees in Ontario, yes. Since January 1, 2021, the AODA has required your public website to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with two exceptions for live captions and pre-recorded audio descriptions. Put that in the brief, because it shapes colours, forms and every image on the site.

The requirement is spelled out on the Government of Ontario's page on making websites accessible, and it applies to web content published after January 1, 2012. Under 50 employees, it isn't legally required, but I'd still write "accessible to screen readers and keyboard users" in the brief. It costs little at the start and a lot to retrofit. If you're in the 50-plus group and the current site fails, accessibility compliance work is its own project, and the brief should say whether it's in scope.

Other lines that belong in the brief for legal reasons: whether you collect personal information through forms (you'll need a privacy policy), and whether you're in a regulated profession with its own advertising rules, like health care or law. A designer can't guess those, and finding out after launch means rewriting pages.

How many designers should get the same brief?

Two or three. Send all of them the same page, word for word, and ask each one to price it line by line. Then the quotes are comparable, and the differences you see are real differences in what's offered, not in what each designer guessed you meant.

When the quotes come back, read them against the brief, not against each other:

• Does each quote name every page from your list, or does it say "up to X pages" with no names?
• Is the text writing included, or did your words line quietly disappear?
• Who registers and owns the domain and hosting account? It should be you.
• What happens after launch, and what does a small text change cost then?
• Did they ask you questions? A designer who asks about your busy season has read the brief. One who sends a PDF price list in four minutes has not.

Before you sign, check the paperwork too. My guide on what a web design contract should say covers ownership and payment terms, and vetting a web designer covers the phone calls to their past clients that most people skip.

Questions owners ask me about website briefs

Source, read on 18 October 2026: Government of Ontario, How to make websites accessible, for the 50-employee threshold, WCAG 2.0 Level AA, the January 1, 2021 date and the two exceptions. Package prices and inclusions are from my pricing page on the same date. Birch Lane Plumbing is made up for this guide.