What the Website Brief Starter does
A website brief is the document that tells a copywriter, a developer, or you, if you are writing the site yourself, what the site needs to say and to whom, before anyone writes a sentence of it. The Website Brief Starter asks you a structured set of questions about the site and turns your answers into a brief you can hand to a copywriter or keep as your own working document. It does not write your copy. It builds the document that makes writing the copy possible, which is a different job and usually the one that gets skipped.
Most people writing a website for the first time start from a blank page and a rough idea of what they want to say. The brief exists to move that rough idea into something specific enough to act on: who the site is for, what each page has to achieve, and what the site cannot say because it is not true yet or not allowed. Answering those questions before you write saves you from answering them halfway through a draft, which is where most rewrites come from.
A missing brief costs time later
Skipping the brief feels efficient because you get to a first draft faster. The cost turns up afterwards, when a page reads well on its own terms but does not match what the business actually does, or speaks to the wrong reader, or promises something the site cannot back up. Each of those is a page written twice: once from assumption, once from correction.
A brief that says "write a homepage for a plumbing business" leaves the writer guessing at the audience, the tone, and what makes this business different from the next one in the search results. A brief that says who the customer is, what they are worried about when they land on the page, and what the business wants them to do next gives the writer something to aim at. The gap between those two briefs is usually the gap between a page that needs one round of changes and a page that needs three.
What a usable brief actually contains
Purpose and audience
Every page on a site is doing a job for a specific reader, and the brief should say what that job is before it says anything about tone or style. A product page selling to a returning customer reads differently from one aimed at someone comparing three suppliers for the first time, and the difference is not decoration. It is the whole approach to the page.
Pages and structure
The brief should list the pages the site needs and what each one is for. A homepage, a handful of service pages, and a contact page ask for different things from a writer than a homepage and twenty product pages do, and the brief should say which one you are building.
Tone of voice
How the site sounds (its tone of voice) is a decision, and it belongs in the brief. If you have not written this down before, the site's guide to defining a tone of voice walks through how to put it into words a writer can actually use.
Constraints and existing material
Anything the copy cannot say, whether that is a claim the business cannot substantiate or a phrase a previous version already tested badly, belongs in the brief too. A constraint stated upfront saves a writer from producing a version that has to be pulled back later for reasons they were never told about.
How to use the tool
Work through the tool's questions in order. The sections build on each other: what you say about the audience shapes what a sensible answer to the tone question looks like, and answering out of order tends to produce a brief with gaps you only notice once it is finished.
- Answer each section with the specific reader in mind
- Fill in the constraints section even when nothing comes to mind immediately, because it is the section most often left blank and most often needed later
- Read the compiled brief back before you send it or start writing from it, checking that it still sounds like your business
What the tool cannot do
The tool compiles what you tell it. It does not know your business, your customers, or your market, so a brief built from vague or optimistic answers will read as a plausible-looking document that is still short of what a writer needs. Treat the output as a first draft of the brief itself, and check every specific claim about the product or the audience against what you actually know to be true before it goes to anyone.
The same caution applies to any tool that turns your input into a finished-looking document: it can produce something wrong, or thin, or half right, without flagging which parts those are. The brief is only as good as the thinking that went into your answers, and the tool cannot supply that thinking for you.
Where this fits next
Once the brief is built, the next decision is what to do with it. If you are writing the copy yourself, the site's guides on writing a homepage and writing a landing page pick up from where the brief leaves off. If you are handing it to someone else, How to Brief a Copywriter covers what a copywriter needs from you beyond the document itself.