Writing web design briefs

Success! You’ve found your ideal website designer. That’s a weight off your mind. Now it’s over to them to guide you through the web design process and make sure you’re prepared and involved so that you end up with the website that best meets your goals and requirements.

That’s not to say your new website will be exactly what you envisaged at the outset – things often evolve because you discover new opportunities or realise that your must-have feature list isn’t quite the same as your customers’ must-have feature list, for example.

That’s why it’s great to find a website designer who works in scrum, an agile methodology that focuses on designing and developing portions of a web project to a potentially shippable state. This gives you the ability to gain early feedback and make important changes when priorities change – before time and budget are consumed.

So how can you be best prepared as you enter the web design process to make sure you take advantage of such opportunities and avoid going down rabbit holes? We’ve put together a few suggestions of things you could pull together so you’ve got them to hand.

It’s all in the preparation

Be prepared to go into the nitty gritty of your:

• business goals
• website goals (what you want to get out of/ achieve from your website)
• feature requirements (e.g. how you want your private members area, resource download, contact form or email newsletter signup to work)
• customers’ wants, interests, needs and key tasks
• competitors
• other websites you do and don’t like and why (don’t just review your direct competitors, think more broadly to include suppliers etc and also complementary sectors)
• marketing activities
• current website performance e.g. Google Analytics, customer and stakeholder feedback

Teacher’s pet

It’s also useful to gather together your:

• technical information (Google Analytics web tracking code, domain and website hosting arrangements)
• brand assets e.g. logo, font and any brand guidelines
• images
• copy (see our blog about writing copy using your keywords)

We know that your contribution as the expert in your business is invaluable to the ultimate success of your website. We suggest blocking out some regular slots in the diary during the web design process so you’ve got time to give it your full attention.

If you’d like to find out more about how we work, we’d love to hear from you.