What Goes in a Website Brief? A Guide for Philippine Businesses

Most website projects begin with a short email: "We need a new website. How much would it cost?" It is a fair question, and the honest answer is always some version of "it depends on what the website has to do." A brief is the tool that turns "it depends" into a real number. You don't need a formal document, and you should never let writing one delay reaching out. But the more of the following you can put on one page, the faster and sharper the proposals that come back.

What a brief actually does

A brief does two jobs, and only one of them is for the vendor.

The first job is internal. Writing down what the site is for forces your own team to agree before anyone outside is involved. The most expensive changes in a web project are rarely the vendor's ideas; they are the ones that surface from your own side in week nine, when a director sees the design and asks why the site is not doing something nobody had written down.

The second job is comparability. If you send the same brief to three agencies and get three wildly different numbers, you've learned something about the agencies. If you send three vague paragraphs and get three wildly different numbers, you've learned nothing about the project, because each one quoted a different imagined version of it.

The eight things to include

1. What your business does, and who the site is for. Two or three sentences on the company, then the primary audience: who should land on this site, and what do they already know? A site for procurement officers reads differently from a site for walk-in customers. If there is an audience you deliberately do not serve, say that too; it saves a round of revisions later.

2. Why now. Something triggered this project: a rebrand, a site that stopped generating inquiries, a platform that nobody can update, an event or campaign with a date attached. Name it. The trigger tells the vendor what actually matters, which is not always what the longest section of the brief says.

3. What success looks like. Pick the one action the site exists to produce: an inquiry, a booked call, an order, an application. Everything else on the site supports that action. If you have numbers, share them; "we get about four inquiries a month and want that to triple" is a brief a vendor can design against. "We want a modern look" isn't a goal, it's a preference.

4. What stays and what goes. List what the current site has, roughly: how many pages, which ones still matter, which are dead. Then answer the question that quietly decides most timelines: who is writing the new content? In our experience the build is the predictable part of a project; reviews, approvals, and content are where calendars stretch. A brief that says "we have a writer" or "we need copywriting included" changes the quote, so it belongs in the brief, not in week six.

5. References, with reasons. Two or three sites you like, one you dislike, and a sentence on why for each. The "why" is the useful part. "We like this site because the product photos do the selling" points a designer somewhere specific; a bare list of links only proves other websites exist.

6. The technical facts. Where the domain is registered and who holds the login. What platform the current site runs on, and where it is hosted. How your email is set up. Any systems the new site must talk to: a CRM, a payment gateway, a booking tool. You don't need to explain them, just name them. And if you can't answer the ownership questions, that is worth sorting out regardless of the redesign; our website ownership checklist covers exactly how.

7. Your budget range. This is the item Philippine clients most often leave out, usually to avoid anchoring the price. In practice it works against you. Naming a range doesn't mean paying the top of it; it means every proposal you receive is scoped to reality instead of guessed. A professionally built business site in the Philippines runs from around ₱90,000 for a basic build to ₱400,000 and up for enterprise work, and the honest breakdown is in our guide to website costs. Even "we have less than ₱200,000 for this" is a perfectly usable line in a brief.

8. The deadline and the decision-makers. If a real date exists (a launch, a campaign, a trade show), put it in the brief so the plan is built around it. Then name who approves the work. A standard company website takes eight to sixteen weeks, and the approval loop moves that number more than the build does; a project with one decision-maker and a project with a five-person committee are different projects. Our guide to project timelines explains where the weeks actually go.

What to leave out

A brief can also be too finished. Three things are better left to the project than settled in the brief.

The sitemap. Listing the content you have is helpful; prescribing the exact pages and menus of the new site is not, because structuring the site around your audience is the work you are hiring for. A brief that arrives with the architecture already fixed locks in the assumptions a good discovery phase exists to test.

The technology, unless it is a genuine constraint. "Our team already works in WordPress" is a constraint worth stating. "Build it in WordPress" as a default preference closes off options before anyone has looked at the problem; describe the outcome you need and let the proposals argue for the platform. If you want to understand the trade-offs first, we compared Webflow, WordPress, and Shopify at length.

The design. References with reasons are gold; a folder of screenshots the designer must copy is a ceiling on the work. Say what impression the site should leave, and judge the design by whether it achieves it.

A one-page template you can copy

About us: what we do, in two or three sentences, and who this site is for.
Why now: what triggered this project.
Success: the one action the site should produce, with current numbers if we have them.
Content: what the current site has, what stays, who writes the new pages.
References: two or three sites we like and why, one we dislike and why.
Technical: domain registrar, current platform and host, email setup, systems to connect.
Budget: our range for this project.
Timing: our deadline if one exists, and who signs off.

Eight lines, one page. If a section is honestly "we don't know," write that; it is a better answer than a guess, and it tells the vendor where to focus the first conversation.

If you don't have all of this

Then send what you have. A brief is a way to get sharper proposals faster, not an entrance exam. One of the best projects we have taken on arrived as three sentences from a family business: what they made, a link to a site last touched years earlier, and the line "we know it's not working, we just don't know why." Diagnosing that gap was part of the work. If you would rather talk it through first, reach out; we reply within one business day, and the first call usually fills in half the template above anyway. And if you want to see what happens once you press send, we wrote up how a Dthree project actually starts, from first email to kickoff.