The most common reason a web project runs over time and over budget is not a technical problem. It is a brief that was never written properly in the first place.
When I receive a brief with a clear objective, a defined audience, and an honest sense of what success looks like, the project moves quickly. When I receive a brief that says something like make it modern and professional, the early weeks are spent doing discovery work that should have happened before we started.
What belongs in a good brief
Start with the business context. What does your company actually do, and who do you serve? Not the elevator pitch version. The honest version. What problems do your customers have before they find you, and what does life look like after they work with you?
Then the objective. Not we want a new website, but we want to increase enquiries from construction companies in the Leinster region by 30% over six months. Specific, measurable, honest.
Next, what you already know about your audience. Demographics matter less than behaviour. How do people find you now? What questions do they ask before they buy? What do they need to see before they trust you?
The pages question
Avoid listing every page you think you need. Instead, describe every job the website needs to do. The sitemap can come from that. If you start with pages, you end up with a site built around your internal structure rather than your customer’s journey.
Finally, be honest about budget and timeline. Both shape what is possible. A designer who knows the constraints can make better decisions than one who discovers them halfway through.
A good brief takes two hours to write. It saves weeks of revision.
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