Web DesignHiring

How to Brief a Web Design Agency: A Checklist for NZ Businesses

Kage Works11 August 20268 min read

Most brief templates ask for your company history and a few sites you like the look of. An agency can write a warm proposal from that. It cannot write a price you can hold anyone to, and you cannot test the finished site against it.

Your brief has two jobs. It makes three quotes describe the same website, so the gap between $6,000 and $18,000 tells you something beyond one agency's confidence. It also gives you a list to check before the final invoice clears. Sort every line you write into one of those two jobs and delete the rest, and your brief drops to about two pages.

Name the things agencies price differently

Agencies price layouts, not pages. Ten pages built from three templates costs less than ten pages with their own designs, so "around ten pages" invites a quote built on the cheapest reading of that sentence. List the pages, then mark the ones that need a design of their own.

Six more lines move the number on a quote, and most briefs leave all six to the agency's imagination:

Forms, and where each submission lands. A contact form that emails an inbox is close to free. The same form writing a record to your CRM, sending an auto-reply, and creating a follow-up task is an integration with its own price.
Content ownership. Say who writes the words for each page and who supplies photography. An agency assuming you'll write 12 pages, quoting against an agency assuming it will write them, produces two numbers that look like a disagreement about price and are a disagreement about who does the work.
Integrations by name, with account status. Xero, Timely, Lightspeed, Mailchimp, a booking widget your supplier provides. Add whether the account exists and who holds admin on it.
Editing scope. List the parts you need to change without emailing anyone: staff profiles, prices, a job listing, blog posts. That list decides how much of the site gets built as editable content rather than fixed markup.
Hosting, DNS, and email. State where the site will live, who pays that bill, and whether the agency is touching your MX records. Get this one wrong and your email stops on launch day.
Existing URLs. If you have a live site, give the page count and say whether the URL structure is changing. A redirect map for 60 pages is a line item, and skipping it points the search traffic you already earned at 404 pages.

Ask whether the quote is GST inclusive while you're collecting all this. At 15% the difference on a $12,000 build is $1,800, and NZ agencies quote it both ways. Our breakdown of what NZ websites cost covers what sits behind the bands.

Put your budget in the brief

Withholding your budget does not extract a lower price. It produces three quotes at three different scopes, which is the outcome the brief exists to prevent.

A range works fine, with a decision rule attached: "$8,000 to $12,000, and we'd go to $15,000 for online booking that writes into our existing system." An agency can then tell you which of those things it would drop, which is the conversation you want before you sign rather than in week five.

Four compliance lines the templates leave out

The brief templates circulating online skip all four, and each one costs more to add after launch than during the build.

Any form that collects personal information

Under information privacy principle 3 of the Privacy Act 2020, you have to take reasonable steps to make sure people know certain things when you collect their personal details directly, including that you're collecting the information, the purpose, the intended recipients, and their right to ask for access and correction (Office of the Privacy Commissioner). A contact form counts.

The brief line is one sentence: every form that collects personal information shows a short collection statement, and the site carries a privacy statement page. Write that statement yourself with Priv-o-matic, the online generator the Privacy Commissioner built for small businesses without much time for compliance work (business.govt.nz), and you stop paying agency copywriting rates for a page you can produce yourself.

One more piece became live this year. IPP 3A, added by the Privacy Amendment Act 2025 and in force from 1 May 2026, extends notification to personal information you collect from somewhere other than the person, such as a third-party booking platform or a purchased list (Office of the Privacy Commissioner). If your new site pulls customer records in from another system, flag it in the brief and get the notification handled during the build.

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 requires consent before you send commercial email. Each message then has to identify you with a way to make contact, and carry an unsubscribe facility the recipient can use at no cost (Department of Internal Affairs). Your agency will wire the signup box to a mailing tool and stop there.

Specify two things instead. The list lives in an account in your name, and the signup records consent with a timestamp you can retrieve later. Agencies that host your list inside their own account leave you re-permissioning subscribers the day you change suppliers.

Prices shown on the page

The Fair Trading Act gives your customers a right to clear and accurate prices (Consumer Protection). The Commerce Commission's guidance goes further on where that disclosure sits: a consumer seeing an advertised price is entitled to assume it's the full price they pay, and fine print noting that GST is additional is unlikely to stop them being misled (Commerce Commission).

Tell the agency which audience each price block targets. Consumer-facing prices display GST inclusive. Trade prices can show excluding GST as long as the label sits beside the number in the same type size, rather than in a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Accessibility, if you sell to the public sector

Web Accessibility Standard 1.2 replaced version 1.1 on 17 March 2025 and moved the requirement up from WCAG 2.1 at Level AA to WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. Cabinet directs public service departments, the Police, the Defence Force and a short list of others to implement it, while other public bodies get encouraged rather than directed (Digital.govt.nz). Private businesses sit outside it.

That still matters to you if councils or government agencies are in your customer list, because their procurement people ask. Naming WCAG 2.2 AA in the brief costs a modest amount inside the build. Retrofitting it after launch means reworking colour contrast and keyboard navigation across a site that's already signed off.

Write down what "done" means

Most briefs describe the site. Few describe the test the site has to pass, which is the reason handover arguments have no referee.

Performance gives you the easiest measurable clause. Google treats a page as good at a largest contentful paint within 2.5 seconds, an interaction to next paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a cumulative layout shift of 0.1 or less, each at the 75th percentile of real page views (web.dev). Field data needs live traffic before it appears, so agree the handover check runs on mobile in PageSpeed Insights, on a named set of pages, with a re-test a month after launch and the agency fixing anything its own build caused.

Four more clauses belong beside it. You can log in and edit each content type on your list without help. A test enquiry arrives in the inbox and shows up as a conversion in analytics. Redirects resolve for the old URLs you listed. Your company name sits on the domain registration and the hosting account, which our article on what to ask before hiring an agency covers in more detail.

One approver, one content deadline

Name the single person who signs off design and copy. A committee of approvers adds calendar time to the project that the agency cannot compress from its side, since work stops until the slowest opinion arrives.

Then put a date on your own content delivery, with the consequence written next to it: late content moves the launch day for day. Agencies that have been burned before will suggest this themselves. Our timeline article has the arithmetic on how reply speed and the NZ holiday calendar stretch a six-week build.

Two things to leave out

Drop the platform instruction if what you have is a constraint. "Build it in WordPress" narrows your quotes to agencies who use WordPress, while "we need to add a staff member and a job listing ourselves" describes the outcome and lets each agency propose a way there. Our platform comparison covers the trade-offs behind that choice.

Drop the long list of sites you admire, too. Two examples with a specific reason attached beat twelve without one. "This booking flow takes three taps" gives a designer something to work with. "Clean and modern" gives them a guess.

Send the same document to every agency

The value in the brief comes from three agencies reading identical constraints. Quotes that differ then differ on approach and price, and you can ask why.

Any agency worth hiring, ours included, will come back with questions about a brief like this rather than a proposal template. Those questions tell you plenty about who you're about to pay.