7 Ways Businesses Brief Web Projects Completely Wrong
A bad brief costs more than a bad developer. Most web projects that run over budget, miss the mark, or need rebuilding after six months share one thing in common, the brief was vague, rushed, or built around the wrong questions. The problem usually starts before anyone opens a design tool. Getting this part right is not complicated, but it does require slowing down and being specific about what you actually need.
On this page
- 1. Describing how it should look instead of what it should do
- 2. No clear primary action for the visitor
- 3. Sending competitor URLs without saying why
- 4. Leaving content as an afterthought
- 5. No mention of existing technical constraints
- 6. Mistaking brand preferences for brand guidelines
- 7. Skipping the audience entirely
1. Describing how it should look instead of what it should do
“I want something clean and modern” tells a designer almost nothing useful. What you actually need to answer is, what do visitors do on this site, and what should they do next? A homepage that converts enquiries needs a completely different structure to one that builds brand awareness. Looks follow function. If the brief skips the functional goal entirely, the design is just decoration.
2. No clear primary action for the visitor
Every page needs one primary thing it asks the visitor to do. Call, buy, book, read, subscribe. Pick one per page. Briefs that list five or six goals for a single page produce cluttered pages that push visitors toward nothing. The brief should name the single most important action for each key page, and the rest of the design should support it.
3. Sending competitor URLs without saying why
“I like this site” is a starting point, not a brief. Without context, a developer cannot tell whether you like the colour palette, the layout, the speed, or the content structure. Useful competitor references come with specific notes. “I like how this navigation stays fixed on scroll” or “their product page keeps the buy button visible at all times” gives someone something to actually work with.
4. Leaving content as an afterthought
Pages need words, images, and sometimes video before they can be designed properly. A brief that says “content to follow” delays the whole build and often means the final design gets retrofitted around content it was never built for. This is one of the most common ways a clean initial design ends up looking cramped and disjointed by launch. Rough content, even placeholder headings and real photo references, should be in the brief from the start.
A brief should also flag who is writing the copy. If the answer is “we’ll sort that ourselves”, agree a deadline before the project kicks off, not after. Late content is the single biggest reason web projects stall mid-build. It is worth treating the content side as its own separate brief with its own structure and deadlines.
5. No mention of existing technical constraints
A brief that ignores the technical environment causes problems later. What platform is the site on? Are there integrations with booking systems, CRMs, or payment processors? Does the hosting have any limitations? These are not optional details. Discovering mid-build that a required plugin conflicts with the server setup, or that a third-party booking system needs a specific PHP version, eats time and budget fast.
Understanding what your hosting environment actually supports before writing a brief saves a lot of backtracking. It is the kind of technical groundwork that gets skipped because it feels dull, but it is exactly the sort of thing that trips a project up two-thirds of the way through.
6. Mistaking brand preferences for brand guidelines
“We like blue” is not a brand guideline. A working brief needs hex codes, font names, logo files in the correct formats, and any existing assets the site must match. Without these, a designer makes decisions by guesswork, and those decisions usually need undoing. One project that comes to mind involved rebuilding an entire WordPress site from scratch because it had been built on top of an incompatible theme, causing styling conflicts that ran right through the front end. None of that would have surfaced in a brief that said “match our current look.”
7. Skipping the audience entirely
A brief that does not describe the actual visitor is a brief built around the client’s preferences rather than the end user’s needs. Who is landing on this site? What do they already know? What do they need to trust before they act? A site for first-time buyers needs different language, layout, and reassurance signals than one aimed at repeat trade customers. If the brief does not answer who the site is for, the design cannot answer it either.
This matters even more when the business is starting from nothing. A client once came with no branding, no online presence, and no website. Building the right brief meant starting with identity, who they were, who they were speaking to, what the brand needed to communicate both online and in print. The domain name, the colour scheme, the copy tone all followed from that. A vague brief at that stage would have produced a site with no coherent direction at all.
If you are about to brief a new site and want to know what it should actually cost, understanding why web design prices vary so much is a useful starting point before any conversations begin.