What goes into a one-page rebuild brief?
Five sections, each a few lines long: buyers, their questions, products and industries, what must not break, and how success will be measured. Leave out colours, fonts and "modern look"; those are the developer's job and will follow once the business facts are clear.
Many rebuild briefs are the reverse: a list of sites the owner likes and a request to make the company's site "more professional". The developer then fills the gaps with a template, and the finished site looks fine while saying nothing a purchase manager needs. The fix is to put business facts on paper before anyone opens a design tool.
Who are your buyers, and what do they ask before they call?
Name the roles, not "customers". A valve maker might sell to purchase managers at EPC contractors, maintenance heads at process plants, dealers in other states and a few export buyers. Each arrives with different questions, and the website has to answer them in that order.
Write down the ten questions your sales team hears most often before a quote: pressure rating, size range, material of construction, lead time, minimum order, test certificates, approvals, warranty, dispatch location. These become the content of the product pages. If you need a starting list, EbizIndia's list of 62 questions industrial buyers ask a manufacturer is a useful prompt to check yours against.
Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content asks whether a page shows first-hand expertise and gives information beyond the obvious. Answers to real buyer questions, in your own numbers, meet both tests.
Which products and industries come first?
Rank them by what earns money or what you want to grow, not alphabetically. The top three products get the deepest pages; the long tail can share a range page.
Give the developer one before-and-after example so the standard is clear. Before: "We manufacture quality ball valves for all industries." After: "Ball valves from 15 to 200 mm, in cast steel and stainless steel, with pressure ratings, end connections and the standards each size is tested to listed in a table, for water treatment, chemical and refinery service." The second version tells a buyer whether to read on. For what a full page should hold, see what an industrial product page needs.
What must not break when the new site goes live?
Everything that already brings business in. That means old page addresses, enquiry forms, phone and WhatsApp numbers, catalogue PDFs that dealers link to, the Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, and the company details in the site's structured data.
Attach the list of current URLs and state that each one must get a permanent redirect to its new equivalent. Google's guide to a site move with URL changes describes the mapping and testing process in detail, and the full list of risks, with who owns each, is in what a rebuild can cost you in Google and AI answers. Treat this section as a site migration checklist, not an afterthought.
How will you know the rebuild worked?
Pick three to five numbers, write down today's value for each, and set the date by which you expect to see a change. Without a baseline, nobody can say six months later whether the rebuild helped.
- Enquiries per month from the website, by product, compared with the average of the last twelve months.
- Clicks from Google Search, from Search Console, back to the old level within a set number of weeks and then above it.
- Speed on mobile. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits. Write these into the brief as pass marks for Core Web Vitals.
- What AI assistants say about you: the same five questions asked before and after launch, answers saved for comparison.
Copy this one-page brief template
Copy this into a document, fill in the right-hand column and keep it to one page. The middle column shows a filled example for a made-up ball valve maker.
| Section | Example entry | Your entry |
|---|---|---|
| Company in two lines | Ball, gate and globe valve maker, 15 to 200 mm, one plant, supplying across India and to two export markets. | |
| Buyers, in order of value | 1. Purchase managers at EPC contractors. 2. Maintenance heads at process plants. 3. Dealers outside our home state. 4. Export buyers. | |
| Top ten buyer questions | Size range, pressure rating, body material, end connection, lead time, minimum order, test certificate, approvals, warranty, dispatch point. | |
| Priority products | 50 mm and 80 mm ball valves first, gate valves second, the rest on a range page. | |
| Priority industries | Water treatment, chemicals, refineries. | |
| Proof we can show | Plant capacity per month, approvals held, test facilities, industries supplied, years in business. | |
| Must not break | Old URLs (list attached), enquiry and catalogue forms, sales phone and WhatsApp, PDFs linked by dealers, Analytics and Search Console access, structured data. | |
| Who owns what | Redirects and forms: developer. Testing enquiries: sales head. Google accounts: held by the company, agency added as user. | |
| Success measures and dates | Website enquiries per month vs last year's average; Search clicks back to baseline in eight weeks; mobile Core Web Vitals passing; AI answers checked before and after. | |
| Not wanted | Auto-playing video, stock photos of handshakes, specifications only in PDF. |
How should you hand the brief to a developer?
Send the same brief to every developer you are considering and ask each to restate it in their own words before quoting. A developer who cannot play back your buyers and your must-not-break list has not read it, and their quote may well leave them out.
Once a developer is chosen, any change to scope goes into the brief as a dated line, so there is always one current version. When the site is ready, walk through the brief row by row with the developer and tick each item on the live site. If you are still weighing whether the current site is worth keeping, the difference between a brochure website and a sales tool is a good place to start, and the website rebuilds section has the rest of the reading path, including how to design a quote form that gets enquiries.
Questions founders ask
Should the brief come before or after we get quotes?
Before. A quote given against a vague request sets a price for a vague website, and every later addition becomes an argument about scope. Agree the brief first, then ask each developer to quote against the same page so the quotes can be compared.
Do I need to know about design or SEO to write the brief?
No. The brief is about your business, not about technology. You know who your buyers are, what they ask your sales team and which products earn the money. The developer's job is to turn that into pages, and the brief gives you a way to check that they did.
How long should a rebuild brief be?
One page for the brief itself, with attachments for long lists such as the old URL list or the product range. If the core brief runs to five pages, the priorities are buried and the developer will pick their own.
What if the developer disagrees with the brief?
Listen, because they may know something about the technology that changes the plan. Ask for the disagreement in writing, decide, and update the brief so there is one version everyone works from.