Writing a Website Brief to Your Designer

Whether it’s your first time writing a brief for a designer or not, there are many things you need to include. Think about it like this, the more thought-out the brief is, the better the end result will be. It will be difficult for us to deliver the perfect website you’re hoping for if we know very little about your company, what you expect, etc. We’ve broken this down into different sections to highlight the most important key points that need to be included.

Tell us about yourself/ your company
Without any information about who you are and what your interests are, it’s hard for us to understand exactly how to provide you with the best possible product. Understanding your company’s goals and core values will help your designer craft your ideal product

What to include in the brief

• Logistics – Where is the company based? How many employees do you have? How old is the company? Basic company information.
• What does the company do? What are the core values of the brand? Any short and long-term goals. What about any USP’s? (Try and keep this section relatively short and spend time making sure the sentences you include truly represent your company)
• Annual Turnover – helps your designer understand the scale at which your operating
• Who are your main competitors – provide their names and website
• Do you already have a logo and brand colours? If not, do you have an idea of what you want?

Important people who are involved in the project
Who in your company is going to be involved with this project? What do you think their role will be during this time? Who is your designer going to be in contact with? Are there going to be people other than this design team responsible for deadlines during this project? This will help your designer know who to contact about certain topics without having to continually check back to make sure they’re not getting wrong information.

This doesn’t need to be a set list, but it’s helpful to provide an idea of how many people will be involved and their roles within the organisation

Overall goals for the project
What are you expecting from this project? Give a general summary of what you expect from the designer. Provide one to two sentences describing what you’re hoping this website will help you gain. What targets are you going to set to help these goals be achieved?

Marketing
As your investing time and money into the creation of a new website, you’ll want all current and potential customers to see it. Do you have a marketing plan? What social media do you use? Is there a advertising schedule that will need to be followed?

Give information about the current website
In this section it is important that you talk about your current website in great detail. These insights will help the designers understand how it is working and what things they need to change.

Here’s what to include –

• How old is the current website?
• What are the main issues with the website? What don’t you like – this can be in terms of functionality or aesthetics.
• What’s good with the current site? Is there anything that you definitely want the new site to include? Have customers mentioned positives about the website?
• How much traffic does the website generate? This can be found out using google analytics, look at statistics on mobile and desktop.

What are you expecting from the new website
This section should be a more indepth version of the goals section of the brief.

• What exactly do you need the website to do for you? This could be any or all of the following; increasing the website traffic, broaden consumer reach, help brand reputation, increase revenue or expand into new or emerging markets.
• What do you want the customer to do when on the website? Is there a ‘call to action’?
• How large would you like the new website to be? (Number of pages desired)
• What are the key features you want included? It may be helpful to restate those mentioned in the previous section. Some common features included in websites for business are:
  • Current vacancies/ Online bookings
  • Blog sections
  • Links to social media
  • Discussion/Comment section
  • Filters – section to section
  • Ecommerce
• Does the website need to be available in different languages? If so, what are they?
• What parts of the website need to be frequently monitored? Who will be in charge of this?
• Are there any third parties that the website must comply with?
• If you decide on a CMS, are there any specific requirements.

Who is your target audience/market?
This website is being created to visually please and entice current and potential customers. Because of this, it’s important that we understand who your target market is. Try to give us a short summary of who customers are.

Things to consider are:

• Where are your consumers located? Locally, nationally?
• With the introduction of the new website, do you want your customers to be the same? Or are you looking to shift or add to the consumer base.

What is your budget?

Don’t be afraid to say straight out what your budget is for this project. This will help make sure all suggestions being made are reasonable and doable.

Timeline
When it comes to design projects, timelines are extremely important. If you have a very short timeline, yet big plans for a website it may not work out logistically and certain aspects may need to be rethought. Setting a timeline from the start helps the designer know whether they will able to efficiently complete the project or not. There may be seperate deadlines for different parts of this project, or you may have a deadline tied to a specific product launch. If you have a loose deadline, this is also very handy to know.

Content
For the best outcome, try to begin thinking about the content for you new website as early as possible. While you may be tempted to just transfer all the content over from your old website, we suggest that you take time to evaluate what is needed and what needs to be redone. How are the images on your website? If they are lacking in quality, you may want to invest in a professional photographer as the photos you have can either make or break your website. Is there any content that will need to be frequently updated? If so, do you have a plan as to who will be doing this

Post-completion maintenance
Often overlooked, especially in the initial brief is website maintenance after its been completed. Consider who will be in charge of doing this maintenance, do they have the skills required? It’s also important to understand what it is that will need updating and maintaining.

Technical Aspects
There are many technical aspects that you need to consider when writing the brief to your designer.

• Are there any technical requirements specialised to your company or industry?
• Do you already own the domain?
• Are there web hosting requirements? Or service level agreements that need to be upheld?

To conclude…
All of the above mentioned topics are very important and should be included in your brief to the designer. This will help provide a brief that lets the designer have a solid understanding of your company. If you have any further questions or clarifications on what to include in your design brief, why not give us a call? We’re always happy to help.