What do you need from us to quote properly?
Five things: what the site has to do for the business and what success looks like a year after launch; who will edit it and what it must connect to; whether designs or brand assets exist; who provides words and photos and when; and a rough budget and timeline. Open questions are fine, stated openly.
A good brief isn’t long. It’s complete on the handful of things that change the scope, and honest about what isn’t decided yet.
What I need to know
What it’s for. Not “a new website”. Enquiries from three towns, bookings without phone calls, a site that doesn’t embarrass you in front of a facilities manager. And what success looks like twelve months after launch, in numbers if you have them.
Who runs it and what it talks to. Who edits content. Your booking, dispatch, CRM or inventory system, if the site needs to connect to one. This is where expensive misunderstandings live.
What exists. Brand assets, designs, photography, or none of the above. Three or four sites you like and a line on why.
Words and pictures. Who writes the copy and when. Copy delay is the most common reason a project runs late.
Money and dates. A budget range, even rough, lets me scope real work instead of guessing. Hard deadlines versus nice-to-haves.
What you don’t need to decide
Plugins, platforms, technical architecture. That’s my job, and a brief that specifies them usually gets in its own way.
The conversation on this site does most of this
Talk to it for a few minutes and the brief writes itself. It comes with you when you get in touch, so you never repeat yourself.