I Wrote This Website Brief in 2014. Here’s What I’d Keep — and Change — in 2026

I went back to a website brief I wrote in 2014 expecting to find something mildly embarrassing.

A few dead platforms. Some terminology nobody uses anymore. Maybe a requirement that now sounds like asking whether the website should support electricity.

There is some of that.

The brief mentions Google Analytics and AdWords. It specifically calls out social-media integration because, at the time, that was still something worth specifying. WordPress appears as a preferred CMS before the project ultimately moved to ExpressionEngine.

But the more surprising discovery was that quite a lot of the brief is still good.

That is probably because the project itself worked.

It launched in 2015, won the Web Marketing Association’s Best Environmental Website award and won Best Website at the 2015 B2B Marketing Awards. The WebAward credits list me as Arjowiggins Graphic’s Digital Marketing Manager and project lead, alongside Mud’s creative and technical leads. The B2B Marketing winner list records “Recycled papers” for Arjowiggins Graphic UK by Our Name is Mud.

More importantly, the site performed. A contemporaneous company update reported that the first three months delivered a 750% year-on-year increase in website traffic, sample requests rose 350%, and social-media interaction increased 130%.

So this is not really an article about everything 2014 got wrong.

It is about what still matters when the technology around the brief has changed almost completely.

The Domain Was Part of the Strategy

The site was called Recycled-Papers.co.uk, which in hindsight is almost aggressively descriptive.

That was the point.

Arjowiggins Graphic manufactured the products, but many of the people we wanted to reach would not necessarily begin their search with the company name. Designers, printers and end users might simply know that they wanted recycled paper.

The domain reflected the language of the category rather than expecting everyone to arrive already knowing the manufacturer.

The site’s role sat somewhere between SEO, lead generation, education and inspiration.

We wanted people to discover recycled paper, understand the different products, see what could be achieved with them, request samples and move closer to specification or purchase.

That meant the website could not just be an online technical data sheet.

It had to make paper look interesting.

You Cannot Inspire Designers With an Uninspiring Website

The previous site had a fairly fundamental problem.

It did not look good enough.

There were usability issues and the forms were not particularly strong, but the bigger problem was more basic: it was supposed to inspire people who cared deeply about visual design, print and materials, while the website itself did very little inspiring.

That is difficult to get away with.

We therefore treated photography as part of the product experience rather than decoration.

Paper is tactile. A screen is not.

The challenge was to communicate qualities such as texture, surface, gloss and print finish through photography. We organised a substantial shoot using printed examples and props, with lighting designed to make those physical characteristics visible.

Mud’s creative director Matt Powell later described using props, lighting and transitions to emphasise the papers’ tactility and quality.

My Role Was Much Bigger Than Writing the Brief

I was the project lead and the most involved person on the client side.

I wrote the brief, created most of the supporting documentation, developed the information architecture, wrote much of the copy and managed the agency relationship with Mud.

I had also studied PRINCE2 around that period, so I thought about the project in fairly formal terms. Senior people in the business acted more like the executive or project-board layer, while I was doing the day-to-day work of moving everything forwards.

Looking back, one of the weaknesses of the process was also one of its strengths:

too much went through me.

That kept the project coherent, but it also made me a bottleneck.

In 2026, AI would not remove the need for the thinking, but it would make research, drafting, documentation, content production, QA and iteration dramatically faster.

I could probably run a similar project in a fraction of the time now.

I Am More Convinced by Detailed Briefs Now, Not Less

Experience has not persuaded me that detailed briefs are old-fashioned.

Quite the opposite.

I have seen enough website projects go wrong to know what happens when everyone begins with a slightly different interpretation of what they are building.

The agency may deliver what was literally requested while the business discovers that what it requested was not what it actually needed.

A good brief forces those ambiguities into the open earlier.

My later ecommerce briefs have generally become more detailed because the projects themselves have become more complicated. Ecommerce introduces payments, fulfilment, customer accounts, subscriptions, CRM, stock, analytics, marketing automation and a web of integrations that did not sit at the centre of this 2014 project.

The CMS Lesson: Be Firm About the Outcome, Flexible About the Tool

The original brief expressed a preference for WordPress.

There was a simple reason: I knew WordPress.

But Mud preferred ExpressionEngine. It was the platform they were most comfortable working with, and at the time they also raised concerns about WordPress being such a common target for hacking.

We went with their recommendation.

With hindsight, I still think that was the right decision.

The project succeeded, and forcing an agency away from the platform it knew well would not automatically have produced a better result just because I happened to know the alternative.

My view today is more contextual.

If I were briefing a conventional ecommerce site, Shopify would often be my starting point. Marketing Made Clear runs on WordPress. Fozzos has been developed using a completely different modern stack.

The technology should follow the job.

Some 2014 Requirements Now Sound Delightfully Quaint

One line in the original article notes, with complete seriousness, that we wanted social-media integration.

That dates the document beautifully.

Although even here, the underlying idea was not ridiculous. I wanted content from different parts of the site and social channels to flow together in a more dynamic way. The implementation language has aged more than the concept.

The same applies to specifying Google Analytics and AdWords.

In 2026, I would not write a breathless requirement saying that the website must have analytics as though we had just discovered measurement.

I would instead be thinking about the wider measurement and data environment: analytics, tag management, consent, Search Console, CRM, ecommerce or lead events, first-party data, integrations and who actually owns the accounts.

The tools have become infrastructure.

The brief therefore needs to move one level up and define what the business needs to know.

Mobile Was Important — But It Was Not Yet Mobile First

I was thinking about mobile in 2014.

The site that launched was responsive, and the contemporary launch material specifically highlighted that it worked across mobile devices.

But the mental model was still different.

This was a B2B site aimed heavily at designers and printers who were likely to be researching materials while at work. Laptop and desktop use therefore felt like the primary context.

Today I would still consider the actual audience rather than mechanically chanting “mobile first”, but mobile behaviour would influence the architecture and content decisions much earlier.

The interesting lesson is that responsive design was already arriving quickly. The bigger change since then is that we no longer treat mobile compatibility as a notable feature.

It is simply expected.

SEO Has Not Become Less Important

SEO appeared in the original brief and I would absolutely keep it there.

If anything, I would integrate it more deeply now.

Recycled-Papers.co.uk itself demonstrated the strategic point. The domain used the language the audience was likely to search for rather than assuming people would already know the corporate brand.

Today I would want search intent, site architecture, content planning, redirects, metadata, internal linking and technical SEO considered during the project rather than after someone announces that the website is finished and asks the SEO person to “optimise it”.

AI search adds another layer, but it does not erase the underlying requirement to create useful, crawlable, well-structured information.

Get it right first time remains much cheaper than repairing a site whose structure was never designed for discovery.

What a 2026 Brief Would Add

I would not replace the old document with a fashionable checklist of technology.

But there are areas I would now expect to be considered much earlier.

The Results Made the Argument Better Than the Brief Ever Could

The site launched in February 2015.

The Web Marketing Association later named it the Best Environmental Website in its 2015 WebAwards. B2B Marketing’s official winners list records it as the winner in the website category at that year’s B2B Awards.

That recognition was nice.

The commercial response mattered more.

Our contemporary reporting said the site generated more visits in February and March 2015 than the previous site had managed across the whole of 2014. During the first three months, traffic was reported as 750% higher year on year, while sample requests increased 350%.

Those are the kinds of numbers that make it much easier to persuade an organisation that digital investment is worth expanding.

And that is what happened.

The success of the UK project helped create interest in extending the approach more widely across Europe and into the broader Arjowiggins web estate. I worked on that next phase, but it was one of the projects that never reached launch before the business later went into administration.

That unfinished ending does not diminish what the original project achieved.

AI Changes the Pace More Than the Purpose

If I ran the same project now, the biggest difference might simply be speed.

In 2014, research, first drafts, copy development, content matrices, competitor reviews, meeting notes, documentation and QA consumed a huge amount of human time.

AI can now compress much of that work.

It can help structure research, challenge a sitemap, create first drafts, identify gaps in a specification, compare competitor propositions, generate test cases and accelerate repetitive content tasks.

That does not mean handing the website strategy to a chatbot and wandering off for lunch.

The business still has to decide what it wants to achieve.

The audience still has needs.

The products still need explaining.

The agency still needs direction.

The person leading the project still needs judgement.

AI makes the work faster. It does not make the brief unnecessary.

The Format of a Good Brief Has Aged Better Than I Expected

Technology has moved a long way since I wrote the Recycled-Papers.co.uk brief.

ExpressionEngine is no longer a platform I would instinctively suggest. AdWords became Google Ads. Analytics became GA4. Cookie consent became unavoidable. Marketing automation became normal. AI entered the process. The phrase “tech stack” became something marketers started saying with a straight face.

But the core questions remain remarkably familiar.

Who is the website for?

What problem are we solving?

What does the business need people to do?

What information and experience will help them do it?

How will we know whether it worked?

I would write a more detailed brief now.

I would measure more.

I would think more explicitly about conversion, integrations, data and automation.

And with AI, I would expect to get from the first document to the finished website much faster.

But I would still start by writing the brief.