Your Opinion: Should a client brief for a new website always include a budget?

As an agency, we have received hundreds of briefs over the years for all sorts of projects, in particular website development. The quality of the brief can vary immensely which in turn, impacts our response greatly ranging from the time we need to spend on it, our enthusiasm for the project and perhaps most importantly, the quality of the information we give back to the client in the proposal. Given that digital development is our area of expertise, and not the clients, we feel this feedback is important to the client - it helps ensure they have an effective site, smooth project delivery and while i hate this term, delivers the ROI that will be measured internally by the client.

So here at Fifth Dimension we've decided to start summarising things that we feel would be invaluable to include in website briefs. Rather than simply preaching our viewpoint, we're going to start asking others, both clients and agencies alike, to offer their feedback on key questions so that we can offer a more rounded opinion. To kick things off, the thorny issue of budgets - should the client let the agency know what their new website budget is, or simply let the agency offer the best price?

There's arguments for both sides ...but rather than voice these now, we'd like to collect your opinion. Please vote on our Facebook poll, and / or give us your reasons for whichever viewpoint you subscribe to. We're also interested to know if you're a client or an agency.

Should a client brief for a new website always include a budget?