Free tools · Planning a website
Build a website brief in five minutes
The reason three quotes come back wildly different is usually that all three were guessing at a different job. Answer these, copy the brief, and send the same one to everybody. The quotes you get back will finally be comparable.
One action. A site that wants five things gets none of them.
Booking system, payment provider, Xero, a supplier feed.
Say it. Withholding it does not get a lower price, it gets the wrong proposal.
Send this to every studio you ask
WEBSITE BRIEF
BUDGET
$2,500 to $5,000
TIMELINE
Within 1 to 2 months
Please quote a fixed price against this scope, and tell me anything
you would do differently.Send the identical brief to each studio. The moment two of them are answering different questions the quotes stop being comparable, which is how a $4,000 job and a $14,000 job end up looking like a judgement call.
Website brief builder · FAQ
Common questions about website brief builders
What should a website brief include?
What the business does, who the site is for, what you want a visitor to do, roughly how many pages, what it must integrate with, your budget range, and your deadline. Budget is the one people leave out, and leaving it out costs you: without it a studio either quotes blind or quotes high.
Should I really tell agencies my budget?
Yes, as a range. Withholding it does not get you a lower price, it gets you a proposal for the wrong size of job. A studio that would do good work for $5,000 will happily design to $5,000, but not if it has spent the proposal guessing you meant $30,000.
How long should a website brief be?
One page is plenty for most small business sites. A twenty-page brief tends to specify the solution rather than the problem, which locks out the better idea the studio might have had.
What if I do not know what I want yet?
Then say that, and describe the problem instead of the website. Any studio worth hiring would rather hear that you are losing enquiries to a competitor than be handed a feature list someone copied off another site.
Rather have someone do it for you?
We build websites for New Zealand businesses at a fixed price from $2,500, live in four weeks.
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