Writing a good brief
How to describe a site so you get the one you wanted.
There is one rule, and everything else follows from it: say the thing only you could say. A model given general words has to guess, and its guess is the average of every website. A model given a street name, a price and a dish has something to build from.
The difference, concretely
Produces the average
Build a modern, clean website for my restaurant. Make it professional and eye-catching with a nice hero section.
Every word here is true of every restaurant. There is nothing to build from, so the result is a template.
Produces a site
Build a site for Alder & Ash, a twelve-table Modern British restaurant on Mill Lane in Oxford. Open Tuesday to Sunday, noon until nine. Show six dishes with prices — hogget with wild garlic £24, cured trout £14. We take bookings for up to eight. Sound like the two people who cook the food.
Twelve tables, Mill Lane, hogget, eight people. None of this is true of any other restaurant.
Four things to include
- 01 Who it is for Not "customers" — "families looking for Sunday lunch", "engineers evaluating a queue", "people who have just been referred". The reader determines the vocabulary.
- 02 What you actually offer The real names of the services, dishes, packages or plans. With prices if you publish them.
- 03 The facts that must appear Address, hours, phone number, registration number, delivery radius. Anything a visitor came to find.
- 04 How it should sound One word is enough: plain, warm, authoritative, technical, direct. This is a setting when you create a project, so you can pick instead of describe.
What not to bother writing
These are already handled, and asking for them again only crowds out the detail that matters.
- Responsive on mobile
- Accessible markup and contrast
- Search-engine metadata and schema.org
- A sensible color palette
- Matching fonts
- Semantic HTML structure
- Form storage and spam screening
- An llms.txt for AI crawlers
Changing things afterwards
Ask for one change at a time and name the part you mean — the vocabulary on the next page is exactly for this. Compare:
- "the top looks wrong"
- "make the opening a split layout, photo on the right"
- "add the prices"
- "add a pricing table with these three tiers and what each includes"
- "it's too busy"
- "use spacious density and remove the key figures row"