The brief to write before you hire
One page you write before your first call with a studio, an agency or a freelancer. Copy it into a doc, fill it in, and send it to everyone on your side who signs off. If their answers differ, that’s the first thing to sort out.
Category
Free resource
Reading time
3 minutes
1. Who the site is for
One sentence. Name a job title and a situation, not a market.
Example: “A head of operations at a 50-person logistics company who has been told to cut energy costs this year.”
2. What they do after reading
Name the one action that counts as the site working: book a demo, request a quote, start a trial, download a spec sheet. Pick one, even if the site supports several.
Example: “Request a quote. A request counts as qualified when it names the product, the quantity and a timeline.”
3. What’s wrong with the site you have
Three lines at most. Things you’ve seen happen, not adjectives. “Visitors ask on sales calls what we do” is useful. “It feels dated” isn’t.
4. Every page you have today
List them, or paste the sitemap, and mark each one keep, merge, rewrite or drop. The pages nobody remembers are the ones that break after launch: old blog posts with backlinks, PDF links in sales decks, the careers page HR linked from LinkedIn.
Example: an old guide marked “drop” because nobody on the team had opened it in a year, while it brought in a large share of the site’s search traffic.
5. Who can edit what after launch
Who on your team changes text, adds a case study or publishes a job post once it’s live? If the answer is “the developer”, say so now.
6. Who signs off, and how fast
Names and roles, what each person signs off on, and the number of working days a review takes. A two-day review on a four-week project adds up quickly.
7. What’s off the table
The section people skip. Anything out of scope, already decided or politically fixed: the logo stays, no new CMS, the pricing page is owned by sales.
8. The date that matters
Is there a real deadline (a raise, a launch, a trade show) or a preferred one? Write which.
How we use it at Desses
This page is the first thing we fill in with a new client, and every design decision after it gets checked against sections 1 and 2. If you’d like a second read of yours, send it to contact@desses.co.