At the beginning of any design process, it is important that you have noted down your requirements on paper so that when you speak to website designers, you know exactly what you need. Although you will make changes to those points as you will sit down for discussions but it acts as a perfect place to start and lets you save your early ideas.
Website design needs to provide a solution to various needs and desires of a company and when more stakeholders are added, the process becomes more complex and you will have to ensure that all parties get to share their views and you will have clear goals in mind which will help you long term.
There is no standard structure of writing a website brief; few will focus on business values and philosophy, whilst rest of them will ensure that minute details of what each button on each and every page is expected to do. It’s important to note that whatever will be written in brief will affect the outcome of the whole project directly.