How to Plan a Website (Without These 7 Costly Errors)

Summary: What You Will Learn

This guide breaks down the seven elements of an effective project brief that can make or break your website or digital transformation project. From defining real problems and measurable objectives to setting transparent budgets, scoping features correctly, and aligning stakeholders early, it shows how a well-written brief prevents costly overruns, delays, and confusion. Whether you’re planning a redesign or a large-scale transformation, these principles will help you de-risk your investment and set your project up for success.

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Key Takeaways

1. Start with problems, not solutions: Document the pains before prescribing fixes
2. Define clear objectives and outcomes: Make success measurable and prioritize ruthlessly
3. Set a realistic budget early: Transparency saves time and enables strategic conversations
4. Get the scope right: Provide depth on features to avoid costly misunderstandings
5. Understand project phases and timelines: Prepare for your team's required involvement
6. Account for modern requirements: Accessibility, performance, and security aren't optional
7. Manage contributors and decision-making: Involve IT and other key players from day one

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Most website projects fail before a single line of code is written. Not because of poor design. Not because of buggy development.

They fail because of something far more mundane—and far more preventable: a poorly written project brief.

The statistics are sobering. Studies consistently show that most digital transformation and IT initiatives miss their targets, often due to misaligned requirements and poor scoping. A recent Boston Consulting Group analysis found that over 30% of large-scale digital projects run over budget or behind schedule (BCG, "Software Projects Don't Have to Be Late, Costly, and Irrelevant," 2024).

And according to the Standish Group's long-running CHAOS Report, only about 31% of IT projects are delivered on time, on budget, and with full scope, while roughly half are "challenged" and nearly one in five fail outright (Standish Group, CHAOS 2020 Report).

The culprit? Unclear requirements, vague scoping, and project briefs that leave agencies guessing about what you actually need.

The good news is that writing a strong brief is the cheapest way to de-risk your website investment. Whether you're a marketer launching a website redesign, a product manager overseeing a digital transformation, or a marketing director managing a six-figure web project, the quality of your project brief will determine the quality of the proposals you receive, and ultimately whether you get a solution that transforms your business.

This guide will walk you through the seven essential elements every project brief needs to give vendors the information they need to deliver accurate estimates, appropriate solutions, and realistic timelines.

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Why Your Brief Matters More Than You Think

Before we dive into the specifics, let's establish why this matters. When you're sourcing vendors for website or digital transformation work, you're not really choosing between agencies based on who has the best portfolio or the slickest pitch deck. You're choosing based on who understands your project well enough to scope it accurately—ideally.

The issue is that if your brief is vague or incomplete, each estimate you receive will be based on different assumptions. For example, one agency might interpret your "login system" as basic username and password authentication, while another could assume you need single sign-on (SSO) with two-factor authentication (2FA). This difference could cost tens of thousands of dollars and lead to significant delays. The brief is crucial; it sets the foundation for everything that follows.

The seven elements that make a brief effective: The brief isn't just paperwork. It's the foundation of everything that follows.

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The Seven Critical Elements of an Effective Project Brief

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1. Start with Problems, Not Solutions

This is the most common and costly mistake in project briefs: jumping straight to solutions before clearly articulating the problems you're trying to solve.

Consider these two approaches:

1. Solution-first (problematic): "We need a new CMS."
2. Problem-first (effective): "Our marketing team can't update website content without involving a developer, which means it takes three weeks to publish time-sensitive content. This is causing us to miss campaign windows and lose competitive advantage."

See the difference? The first version assumes the solution. The second version explains the pain, which allows vendors to recommend the most appropriate solution, which might be a new CMS, but could also be upgrading your existing system, implementing better workflows, or providing training.

Common problems worth documenting:

• Content management bottlenecks (requiring developer intervention for basic updates)
• Aging or deprecated technology that's expensive to maintain
• User experience that feels dated or doesn't convert
• Compliance gaps (privacy, accessibility (WCAG AODA/ADA, GDPR)
• Performance issues affecting search rankings or user retention
• Integration challenges between marketing systems

Before writing a single word about what you want to build, conduct an internal workshop to document every pain point, frustration, and inefficiency your current digital presence creates. Be specific. Be honest. This list becomes the "why" behind your project.

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2. Define Clear Objectives, Measurable Outcomes and your Audience

Objectives provide direction, while outcomes ensure accountability. Too often, briefs include vague objectives like "Improve user experience" or "Modernize our digital presence," which fail to guide decision-making or measure success effectively.

Instead, define what measurable change you want to achieve:

• Reduce content publishing time
• Achieve WCAG compliance to eliminate accessibility risk
• Improve mobile conversion rate
• Reduce support tickets related to website issues

Not every outcome needs a precise number, but it should be specific enough that both you and your vendor can clearly envision what success looks like.

The priority trap: Here's where most organizations stumble—they list seven "top priorities." Priority, by definition, is singular. You can have critical, high, medium, and low-priority items, but you should only have one critical priority. This forces clarity and prevents scope creep.

The audience framework: When defining objectives, be equally clear about who you're building for. Use a tiered audience approach:

• Primary audience: The people without whom your business wouldn't exist. If this audience disappeared tomorrow, you'd have no business. Define them clearly.
• Secondary audience: Adjacent users who visit your site or use your product but aren't your core business. You could survive without them, but they add value.
• Tertiary audience: Internal teams, government bodies, partners, or constituents who need information but aren't your business focus.

This framework prevents the common mistake of trying to serve everyone equally, which inevitably means serving no one well. If someone asks you to implement a feature that will 10x your budget but only serves your tertiary audience, the answer is simple: don't do it.

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3. Set a Realistic Budget Early

This is the most controversial recommendation in this guide, but it's also the most important—include your budget or budget range in your brief.

The resistance to budget transparency usually comes from a belief that hiding your budget gives you negotiating leverage. The reality is the opposite.

Think of your project brief like a job posting. The best job postings include salary ranges because it helps candidates self-qualify. The same logic applies to vendor selection. Sharing your budget helps agencies determine if they're a fit, and if they are, it allows them to shape scope appropriately rather than guess.

Here's a real-world example from our own agency: A non-profit recently approached us with a strict budget cap; it was well below our typical project minimum. Instead of walking away or inflating the quote, we asked: "What can we deliver within this budget that will maximize impact?" We adjusted the scope, cut low-priority features, and delivered a scope of work tailored to their budget and needs. That conversation would never have happened without budget transparency.

The myth of the budget upsell: Some clients worry that agencies will simply fill whatever budget number you give them. In practice, reputable agencies don't operate this way. They have established project minimums and pricing structures. What budget transparency allows agencies to do is have strategic conversations about trade-offs. Should you cut that nice-to-have feature to stay on budget? Should you phase the project differently? Should you consider off-the-shelf tools instead of custom development?

These are valuable conversations that only happen when everyone knows the financial parameters.

What if you genuinely don't know your budget? Then provide a range. Even a wide range is better than nothing. "We have between $50,000 and $150,000 allocated for this project" tells vendors a tremendous amount about project scale and allows them to calibrate their proposals accordingly. It saves everyone time by preventing mismatched expectations.

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4. Get the Scope Right: Avoid "Magic Word" Requirements

This is where most briefs fall apart completely. Features get listed as single-line items without any depth, detail, or context. The result? Wildly different interpretations and estimates that vary by 200% or more.

Consider a feature as seemingly simple as "member login" What does that actually mean?

• Basic username/password authentication with password reset?
• Single sign-on (SSO) integration with existing enterprise systems?
• SSO plus two-factor authentication plus specific security protocols required by your industry?

The cost difference between these scenarios is enormous, but if your brief simply says "member login," you're asking vendors to guess which one you mean. That's not fair to them or to you.

Another deceptively simple feature. "Events calendar" could mean:

• A simple display calendar showing date, time, and location (relatively straightforward)
• A full event management system with online registration, payment processing, automated confirmation emails, waitlist management, cancellation policies, refund handling, and attendee communication (enterprise-level complexity)

If you custom-build the second version, you're looking at costs that could be 10x your budget. If you use a third-party tool like Eventbrite, you get all that functionality at a fraction of the cost and with better reliability.

Forms are also a silent budget killer. Many clients assume forms will be part of the CMS and that they'll be able to build any form they want, connecting it to various data sources. This is almost never the case out of the box, and building a custom form builder is extraordinarily expensive.

For common features like forms, event management, and payment processing, strongly consider third-party tools:

• Forms: Jotform, Typeform, or Google Forms instead of custom form builders
• Events: Eventbrite or similar platforms instead of custom event systems
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, or commerce platforms instead of custom payment systems

Custom building these features makes sense only when you have truly unique business logic that off-the-shelf tools can't handle. In most cases, you don't.

For every feature in your brief, ask these questions:

• What exactly does this feature need to do? (List specific functionality)
• Who will use it and how often?
• What data does it need to collect, display, or integrate with?
• Are there off-the-shelf tools that could handle this?
• What's the simplest version that would meet our core needs?

The more specific you can be, the more accurate the estimates you'll receive.

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5. Understand Project Phases and Your Team's Commitment

Digital transformation and website projects aren't something that happens to you—they're something you participate in actively. Understanding the typical phases of a project and your team's required involvement is critical for realistic planning.

This isn't tripling your workload, but it's also not zero effort. Projects typically run four to eight months, and there will be weeks when this project requires focused attention from you and your team.

The question to ask vendors: "What does my team's involvement look like in each phase?" The best clients ask this early, oftentimes as a proposal requirement. They understand their own capacity constraints—that IT is only available for the next month, that the content team is already overloaded, that approvals require executive committee review which happens quarterly.

Content readiness is the #1 cause of project delays. More than technical challenges or design revisions, waiting for content, approvals, and stakeholder sign-offs derails timelines. If your brief acknowledges these potential bottlenecks upfront, vendors can build appropriate timelines and processes to mitigate them.

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6. Account for Modern Requirements

Your website or digital product doesn't exist in a vacuum. It operates within an ecosystem of technical standards, user expectations, and legal requirements that your brief needs to acknowledge.

Modern baseline requirements include:

• Accessibility compliance: WCAG AODA/ADA standards aren't just best practices—they're legal requirements in many jurisdictions. In Ontario, AODA compliance is mandatory. Failing to address accessibility creates legal risk and excludes users.
• Performance optimization: Core Web Vitals are now ranking factors in search results. Slow websites don't just frustrate users; they actively hurt your visibility. Your brief should acknowledge that performance isn't optional.
• SEO implementation: Basic on-page SEO, proper heading structure, meta descriptions, schema markup, and crawlability should be table stakes, not add-ons.
• Security standards: HTTPS, regular updates, secure authentication, data encryption, and backup systems should be assumed.

If your brief doesn't mention these requirements, vendors will make assumptions. Some will include them by default. Others won't. The result is estimates that aren't comparing like for like.

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7. Manage Contributors and Decision-Making

Website and digital transformation projects touch every part of your organization, which means the decisions aren't isolated to marketing. Oftentimes these projects involve marketing, IT, and executive leadership, in varying capacities.

Define who needs to be involved, to what extent, and when:

• IT/Technology teams: They're consistently brought to the table too late, and they always have critical input. Hosting requirements, security protocols, existing infrastructure, integration capabilities—IT perspective is essential from day one, especially at the proposal phase.
• Content teams: Who will create, manage, and maintain the content? What are their workflows? What are their skill levels?
• Leadership/Executive sponsors: Who has final approval authority? What's the approval process?
• Compliance/Legal: What are regulatory requirements? What are risk factors?
• Customer service/Support: What are the most common user issues? What information do customers struggle to find?

Before finalizing your brief, circulate it to every stakeholder group for input. You're not asking for approval; you're asking for gaps, concerns, and requirements you might have missed.

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The Discovery Phase is Your Secret Weapon

Throughout this guide, we've emphasized the importance of a detailed brief. But here's the reality: for complex projects—anything involving custom applications, intricate user flows, significant integrations, or enterprise-scale websites—creating that detailed brief yourself is extraordinarily difficult.

This is where the discovery phase becomes your secret weapon.

A discovery phase typically costs between $5,000 and $15,000. This upfront investment is the most cost-effective way to de-risk everything that follows for a project that is often a large capital investment.

What happens in discovery:

• Detailed requirements gathering through structured interviews and workshops
• Technical assessment of existing systems and infrastructure
• User research to understand actual behaviour and needs
• Feature prioritization using the frameworks described in this guide
• Architecture and technical planning
• Detailed project roadmap with accurate timelines and costs

The output: A comprehensive project blueprint that becomes the basis for accurate estimates. Instead of vendors guessing about your requirements, they're working from a document that was created collaboratively with your team.

For simpler projects like standard marketing websites and template-based builds you may not need a full discovery phase. But for anything complex, hiring an agency to conduct discovery before you even write an RFP is money extremely well spent.

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Putting It All Together: Your Brief Writing Action Plan

If you take nothing else from this guide, implement this three-tiered approach based on your project complexity and resources:

1. Best approach (highly recommended for complex projects): Hire an agency to conduct a discovery phase and create your project blueprint. This typically costs $5,000–$15,000 and eliminates most of the guesswork and risk.
2. Mid-tier approach (effective for standard projects): Use this guide as a template and validate your brief with a technical consultant or trusted vendor before releasing it. Get their feedback on whether your requirements are detailed enough and your budget is realistic.
3. Minimum viable approach (bare minimum for any project): At the very least, ensure your brief includes:
   
   • Clear problem statements and objectives
   • Primary audience definition
   • Budget or budget range
   • Detailed feature requirements (not just feature names)
   • Timeline expectations and constraints
   • Key stakeholders and decision-makers

The Bottom Line

Digital transformation and website projects don't fail because of bad code or ugly design. They fail because of unclear expectations, vague requirements, and mismatched assumptions between clients and vendors.

Your project brief is the foundation of everything that follows. It's your opportunity to align expectations, surface potential issues, and give vendors the information they need to deliver accurate estimates and appropriate solutions.

The irony is that writing a comprehensive brief takes more time upfront. But that time investment pays for itself many times over by preventing the scope changes, budget overruns, and timeline extensions that plague poorly defined projects.

Your website or digital transformation is an investment in your business. Treat the brief as seriously as you'd treat any other major business investment. The 70% of projects that fail? They're the ones that skipped this step.

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FAQ

What is a project brief for a website or digital transformation project?

A project brief is a short, structured document that explains the problem you're solving, the objectives and outcomes you want, the scope and features, your budget or budget range, timeline expectations, and the key decision-makers. It helps vendors create accurate proposals and prevents costly misalignment.

Why do so many website and digital transformation projects fail?

Most failures stem from unclear requirements, shifting scope, unrealistic budgets, and poor alignment between internal teams and vendors. Studies show up to 70% of digital transformation projects miss their goals, and one in three website projects go over time or budget by 25%+.

What should a website project brief include?

At minimum: clear problem statements, measurable objectives, your primary audience, a budget or budget range, detailed feature requirements (not just feature names), timeline expectations, and the people involved in decisions.

Should I include my budget in a project brief?

Yes. Sharing a realistic budget or range helps agencies self-qualify and propose scope that fits your financial limits. It saves time and prevents mismatched expectations.

What is a discovery phase and do I need one?

A discovery phase is a paid engagement (often $5k–$15k) where an agency works with you to define requirements, audit your tech stack, research users, and produce a clear project roadmap. It's highly recommended for complex, custom or enterprise-scale projects.

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