Websites and development6 min read
What nobody tells you before the first meeting with a web studio
A website development brief is not a technical specification but a short document about the goal, audience, materials and constraints of a project. A good brief saves weeks of correspondence because the studio immediately understands what to launch, from what and within which limits.
Why a brief when there is a specification
A technical specification describes how the site will work. A brief describes why it is needed and what you already have. Without a brief the specification is written on guesses and rewritten after every meeting. That is why the first document QIO asks a client for is one or two pages of answers to simple questions.
A brief needs no special form: an email, a note or the studio template will do. What matters is honest answers, including "we do not know yet".
What briefs most often lack is not a design description but a list of materials and owners: who provides texts, photos and access, and by when. Once that is written down before the start, the project timeline stops drifting.
Goal and audience
One goal per launch: enquiries, sales, registrations, a product presentation. If there are several, name the main one and postpone the rest to the next stage. Describe the audience through their situation: who they are, what they already know about you, where they come from and which action they should take. Structure and tone follow from this.
- The main goal and one measurable visitor action.
- Two or three audience segments and their typical questions.
- Traffic channels: advertising, search, referrals, mailings.
Materials you have and materials you lack
Half of the project time is usually spent waiting for materials, so list them honestly: texts, photos, logo and brand style, cases, documents, access to the current site and analytics. For each item say whether it exists, who is responsible and when it will be ready.
Missing materials are not a problem but a task: the studio can prepare texts and visuals, but that becomes part of the scope and timeline.
- Texts and section structure, or their absence.
- Photos, video, illustrations, logo, Figma layouts if any.
- Access: domain, hosting, current CMS, Metrika and Search Console.
Functions and integrations
List the functions without which the launch makes no sense, and separately those that can be added later: forms and calculators, a client area, a catalogue, payment, languages, search. Name the systems the site must exchange data with: a CRM such as amoCRM or Bitrix24, accounting, a payment service, delivery, telephony, mailings.
Integrations are the most common reason budgets grow, so name all of them at once, even if a connection is planned six months ahead.
Constraints and decision-making
Deadline, budget, platform requirements, legal limits, corporate standards and who makes decisions. If approvals pass through several people, say so: three rounds of edits change the work plan.
Separately name what cannot change: page URLs with traffic, brand colours, integrations that already work.
The 10-point brief checklist
Collect the answers from the list and send them to the studio together with a link to the current site. That is enough for a first estimate.
- Launch goal and the main visitor action.
- Audience and its questions.
- Traffic channels.
- Current site: what to keep, what gets in the way.
- Texts and structure.
- Visual materials and brand style.
- Must-have functions and functions for later.
- Integrations and external systems.
- Deadline, budget, constraints.
- Who decides and how approvals work.
Sources
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