How to brief a web agency.

What a brief must contain

Five things: what the business does and for whom, what the website must change (in numbers where possible), who the buyer is and how they research, the constraints (budget band, deadline, brand, compliance), and how you will judge success. That is one or two pages. Everything else is reference material.

State the budget band. Withholding it does not get you a better price; it gets you a proposal scoped blind. Agencies design to budgets the way architects design to plots.

The instinct to hide the number comes from a reasonable fear: that whatever you say, the quote will come back at exactly that figure. It usually will, and that is not the scam it looks like. A studio given £15,000 will propose the best £15,000 project it can. A studio given nothing will propose the project that is easiest to sell, which is rarely the one you need. You are not buying a commodity at the lowest available price; you are deciding how much website to buy.

How long should a website brief be?

One to two pages. If it runs to fifteen, you have written a specification, and a specification pre-commits you to solutions before anyone has researched the problem. Attach the long material — brand guidelines, analytics exports, product data — as appendices the agency can read if it wants to.

The test of a good brief is not completeness, it is whether a studio could disagree with it intelligently. A brief that says "we need a modern, professional website" cannot be disagreed with, because it says nothing. A brief that says "our buyers are procurement managers who need to verify accreditations before they will book a call, and they currently cannot" invites a real response.

What if we do not know our numbers?

Say so in the brief rather than inventing figures. "We do not currently know how many enquiries the site produces, and fixing that is part of what we want" is a legitimate and quite common starting position, and any studio worth hiring will treat it as the first piece of work rather than a disqualification.

What you almost certainly do know, even without analytics, is how many enquiries reach sales in a month and roughly what one is worth. Those two numbers are enough to size a sensible budget, and they are the two that matter most.

What to leave out

Page lists and feature lists. If the brief specifies 'a carousel on the homepage', you have hired hands rather than judgement. Describe the outcome ('procurement teams need to verify our certifications quickly') and let the studio propose the mechanism.

Design references are useful as taste signals, not specifications. Three sites you respect, with one sentence each on why, beats a folder of screenshots.

Leave out the internal politics too, at least in the written brief. Which director dislikes the current colour, which department wants its own landing page, which agency was fired last year — none of it belongs in a document you send to four studios, and all of it is worth saying out loud on the first call. The written brief is the problem statement; the conversation is where the context lives.

Should I send the same brief to every agency?

Yes. Tailoring the brief per agency makes the proposals incomparable, which defeats the point of running a process at all. Send one document, answer follow-up questions in writing, and share the answers with everyone bidding.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The best question asked by any bidder is usually worth more to you than your original brief, and sharing the answer keeps the comparison honest instead of rewarding whoever happened to ask first.

How many agencies should I brief?

Three is the practical number. Two gives you no real comparison, and five means every studio knows it has a 20% chance and invests accordingly — you get thinner proposals from everyone, including the one you would have hired.

Tell each of the three how many others are bidding and roughly when you will decide. Studios price and prepare differently for a real shortlist than for a lottery, and being straight about it usually improves what you get back.

Questions that expose the real agency

Ask who exactly will design and build your project, and meet them before you sign. At many agencies the pitch team and the delivery team are different people; at Web Hero the person you brief is the person who ships, which is the senior-only model in practice.

Ask what their last three projects were measured on and what the numbers did. Studios that work to outcomes will answer with specifics (ours are on the case studies page: Quartix +128% organic sessions, Coptrz +92% qualified leads, Cademi 3.4x demo requests). Studios that work to deliverables will answer with adjectives.

The single most revealing question is what they would cut from your scope. It is uncomfortable to ask and more uncomfortable to answer, which is exactly why it works. A studio that says "nothing, it all sounds important" is selling. A studio that says "the multilingual requirement is doubling your cost for a market you have three customers in, park it for phase two" is thinking, and that is the thing you are actually buying.

• Who does the work, and do we meet them pre-contract?
• What were your last three projects measured on?
• What would you cut from our scope, and why?
• Who owns code, hosting and accounts after launch?
• What happens in the three months after launch?
• What have you learned from a project that did not work?

Who owns the website when the project ends?

You should, unambiguously, and it should be written down before you sign. That means the code, the hosting account, the domain, the analytics property and the CMS licences are in your organisation's name, with the agency holding access rather than ownership.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The most common way a business gets trapped with an agency it has outgrown is not a contract clause, it is that nobody can find the domain registrar login. Ask the question at brief stage, when it costs nothing, rather than at the point of leaving, when it costs everything.

Should I ask for spec work or free mockups?

No, and the studios you most want to hire will decline. Free design work is unpaid, un-researched and produced to impress rather than to solve, so it selects for whoever is least busy and most willing to guess. It also tells you nothing about how they work, which is the thing you are trying to assess.

If you want to see thinking before committing to a full build, pay for a small piece of it. A paid discovery, audit or strategy phase gives you a real sample of the work and a document you keep either way. Ours is the £1,500 Action Plan, but the principle holds whoever you buy it from.

Scoring proposals

Weight evidence over polish: named clients with named outcomes, a process that starts with your buyer, and a scope itemised enough to argue with. A proposal you cannot disagree with line by line is hiding its thinking.

Compare like for like before comparing price. A £6,000 proposal and a £16,000 proposal are frequently not the same project: one includes research, content structuring, integrations and three months of post-launch work, and the other includes a design and a build. Put the two scopes side by side line by line and the gap usually explains itself — sometimes in favour of the cheaper one.

Watch how each studio handles disagreement during the process, because that is the clearest preview of the project you will have. Push back on something in the proposal and see what happens. Immediate capitulation is as bad a sign as defensiveness; you want the studio that explains its reasoning and then either holds the line or changes its mind for a stated reason.

If you want a structured starting point instead of a blank page, our £1,500 Action Plan audits your current site and hands you a prioritised roadmap you can brief any agency with, including us.