How to brief a website agency

How should a small business brief a website agency? Begin with the action a visitor should take and the information your team must be able to maintain after launch. “Make a modern website” is not enough to compare bids or judge delivery. A short brief with pages, lead handling, ownership and acceptance checks creates a much clearer buying decision.

What conversion must the design support?

Write one primary visitor task, such as requesting a consultation, booking a visit or obtaining a quote. Name the audience and the questions they need answered first. For an illustrative local service company, the goal might be 20 qualified enquiry forms a month within six months. That is a fictional planning target, not a forecast. A useful form would ask for the service, location, preferred date and permission to contact, while avoiding fields the team does not need. Decide who receives the enquiry and how quickly they should reply. A site cannot create revenue if nobody owns the handoff.

Sketch the first pages: home, service details, area or eligibility information, evidence or case studies, about, contact and privacy. List who supplies copy, photographs, brand assets and legal text. Ask the agency to identify assumptions it has made about existing systems and content. If you plan paid ads, distinguish a campaign landing page from the core site and ask who will create and measure each one. IMDA's SMEs Go Digital offers a current official route for businesses exploring digital solutions; it does not endorse a particular agency for your project.

Which questions should every agency answer?

Request itemised prices for discovery, design, copy, development, forms, analytics, search basics, accessibility checks, hosting, maintenance and post-launch support. Ask for the number of design rounds, what counts as a change request, who licenses or owns images and software, and which work is done by subcontractors. Require a timeline with approval points. Ask each agency to demonstrate the editing experience with a typical service-page update, not just show a polished home page. If a quote includes “SEO”, ask exactly which pages, technical settings and measurement tasks are included.

In an illustrative comparison, Agency A has a lower build fee but charges monthly for every content edit; Agency B costs more initially and trains staff to edit approved fields. A twelve-month cost and the expected editing workload expose the real difference. Ask for a separate support price after the included period. Neither fictional quote represents a current market rate.

Test ownership, privacy and handoff

Ask who owns the domain account, hosting account, source files, content and analytics property. Put transfer and export steps in the agreement. PDPC's data-protection obligations are relevant where enquiries contain personal data. Ask what is collected, who can access it, where it is sent and how long it remains. Test the full journey on desktop and mobile: a visitor opens a service page, understands the offer, submits the form, sees a confirmation and the right employee receives the lead. Include error, spam and duplicate-enquiry cases. Agree what counts as a passed launch, who fixes defects and how quickly.

Our CRM comparison guide helps specify the lead destination; the customer-enquiry approval guide helps assign responses; the operations topic covers the wider workflow. You can send Methodology a website-brief question for editorial guidance on the scope. We do not claim an agency match or a commissioned referral is available.

Common questions