Guide · Hiring
A brief you can
write in an hour.
Website projects rarely stall on design. They stall because the business owner was asked for the text, the photographs and the service list, and a busy person cannot produce those in evenings. A short brief up front prevents most of it.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
Six lines that do most of the work.
What the business does, in one sentence a stranger would understand. Who the customer is. Where you work. The three services you want more of. What you charge, or what the price depends on. What makes someone pick you over the business next door.
That last line is the one most owners cannot answer immediately, and it is the one the entire site depends on. If the honest answer is “nothing obvious”, that is worth knowing before design starts rather than after.
What you actually have to supply.
Photographs of your own work. Nothing else on this list is as hard to substitute, and nothing else moves enquiries as much. A designer can write around missing text; they cannot invent evidence that you have done the job before.
Your service list with real prices or ranges, your hours, your service area, and any licence or registration numbers your trade requires on advertising. Gather those into one document and the project stops waiting on you.
Four questions to ask before signing.
Who writes the text — and what happens to the timeline if I do not? Who owns the domain and where is it registered? What happens to the site if I stop paying? What is included after launch, and what is billed?
Ambiguity in any of these is where projects go wrong later. All four should have one-sentence answers.
Say what you do not want.
A carousel nobody waits for. A stock photograph of a handshake. A “Welcome to our website” paragraph. An animation that delays the phone number.
Negative requirements are easier for a busy owner to produce than positive ones, and they are just as useful to a designer.
Agree what “finished” means.
Before work starts, write down what launch requires: pages live, redirects in place if this replaces an existing site, analytics recording enquiries, the Google listing updated to match, and someone named who makes changes afterwards.
Projects that end without those last two produce a site nobody measures and nobody maintains, which is how a new website becomes an old one in eighteen months.
Questions
Before you ask.
How long should a brief be?
One page. Longer briefs from non-specialists tend to specify solutions rather than problems, which narrows what a good designer can offer you.
Should I provide examples of sites I like?
Two or three, with a sentence each on what specifically you like. “This one, because the price is visible immediately” is useful; a folder of screenshots is not.
What if I genuinely have no photographs?
Say so at the start. It changes the design and the budget, and it is the single most common reason a finished site underperforms.
Before you decide anything
Find out whether
you have a problem.
Most people asking about a rebuild do not need one. The free check opens your site, looks at how it behaves on a phone, whether it is secure and how old the page is, and tells you which of those apply to you.
Start with a
straight answer.
Describe the business and where it works. We come back with what we would change, what it would cost and how long it takes — or with a reason not to bother.