1. Introduction
What is a Website Brief?
A website brief is a document that outlines the company’s goals and specifications that are required for the development of their website. It acts almost like a blueprint for how the website should be built ensuring that we see eye to eye with the client before beginning development. By detailing exactly how you want your website to function and look, you will reduce the risk of ending up with a website that doesn’t meet your requirements and in turn increase the speed of the website’s development.
A solid brief is crucial to the success of a web development project as it shares the clear goals and visions of the client with the agency, for example, whether they’re aiming to generate leads and or sell a product. It also improves communication between agency and client by providing clear documentation for your perfect website. A clear brief will also help to maintain brand identity as you will typically provide the agency with your colour scheme and logos, so the agency can produce a design that is consistent with your brand guidelines.
Why is a Website Brief Important?
A website brief plays a pivotal role in the success of a web development project by serving as a guide to meet your expectations. It simplifies the process and ensures that everyone involved is on the same page throughout the development of the website.
It acts as a centralised document where all requirements and ideas are clearly outlined therefore minimising the chance of misunderstanding /miscommunication and acting as a reference point for all stakeholders. With having everything documented, there’s less back and forth saving time and frustration. A clear brief helps to prioritise features and avoid unnecessary additions that don’t support the core objective, saving time and making the project more efficient.
A website project often involves multiple parties including; designers, developers and marketers therefore its crucial that each party understands the aim of the project.
2. Define The Purpose
Whilst putting together your website, you’ll want to decide on the purpose of your website. For example, would you want to have an e-commerce site or a simpler ‘brochure’ site?
With an ecommerce site you can easily distribute products to consumers (or other businesses depending on your business model) via nationwide delivery, allowing you to reach far more customers than if you had a physical store, especially useful if your products only appeal to a niche audience.
If you’re not selling online, a brochure website can be a great way to find potential customers and generate leads. You could create landing pages for each of your target markets and use enquiry forms on those pages to capture enquiries.
3. Describe Your Brand
Key to a successful understanding of the project is to make sure to clearly describe your brand so that not only does it have consistency across the site but across all of your marketing channels such as print, social and so on. The brand should talk to your target audience and therefore it is key to get it right.
Tone of voice
Whether you’ve done your content already or if you’ve already got a site that you’re pulling the content from, define your tone of voice. This will reflect how your brand is perceived and the personality of it, all of which in turn allows your copywriters and designers to understand it and craft the content and visuals that connect with it.
Visual Identity
Share everything you can in terms of your brand’s visuals. Providing these assets allows the designers to fully understand the branding from a visual point of view and therefore keep it consistent across the site and reflect all your other channels.
These assets may include:
- Brand colours with pantone references, hex and RGB codes.
- Logos in high-quality and/or vector formats.
- Fonts and typography preferences.
- Any existing style guides or design systems.
- Other marketing collateral
Providing these will ensure consistency with your current branding while allowing the website designer to extend and adapt it for the website.
Competitor Analysis
We’ve spoken about in-depth competitor analysis previously. With your brief, be sure to include a list of competitors’ websites that you like or dislike. Highlight specific elements that stand out, such as navigation, layout or functionality and elements that you dislike.
This analysis gives the designer a clear understanding of industry standards while helping your website stand out from the crowd. It may also be beneficial to share websites that are not necessarily competitors or in your industry if they reflect aesthetics you are looking to achieve – being different to the industry can help you stand out.
Similar to your tone of voice, to understand the branding and how the website should look and function it’s important to identify your target audience. You can have multiple target audiences but if you have multiple websites then each should revolve around a key message, and so identifying your primary audience is crucial here.
A few factors to consider:
- Demographics: Age, location, gender, and other statistical information.
- Behaviour: How they typically interact with websites, including device usage and browsing habits.
- Needs and Pain Points: What problems are they looking to solve? How can your website meet those needs effectively?
By tailoring the website’s tone, visuals, and functionality to your target audience, you’ll create a user experience that resonates with visitors and drives engagement. Including these points in your brief will set a strong foundation for your project’s success.
4. Specify Core Features and Functionality
When specifying your website it’s important to consider the kinds of features and functionality you will require as this can have an impact on the cost/complexity of your project. Some examples of functionality would be:
Enquiry forms
A basic enquiry form is usually a simple request, but do you need your enquiry form to integrate with your CRM system? If you are using a common CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot then it’s usually relatively easy to integrate these, but if you are using a more obscure CRM system it may require some work to integrate with their API.
Ecommerce
If you want to sell online you will need to make sure that the CMS (Content Management System) your website is being built in has an ecommerce plugin/module, for example WooCommerce. Do you need the ecommerce system to integrate with your EPOS/stock control system? If so this needs to be specified at the outset.
Online booking
If you sell tickets for events you may want to do this directly on your website using a booking plugin/module for your CMS, or alternatively you could use an external booking platform such as Eventbrite to keep things simple.
5. Outline Content Requirements
It’s a good idea to plan out the types of pages you will need on your new website early on – for example – Home, About us, Services, Products, News etc. Provide a rough sitemap in your brief if possible. Also, if you’ve not already got content ready to go, start writing it now – most website projects are held back by content not being ready, so try to get ahead now!
If you’re struggling to write content, hiring the services of an experienced copywriter might be a good idea, or you could use AI to give you some inspiration! When writing content think about weaving search keywords into your copy as well for those all important search engine rankings.
6. Establish Budget and Timeline
As part of the planning process you’ll want to define a realistic budget range. Not only does this help to manage the project’s scope, it also helps to prevent overspending.
If you don’t set a realistic budget then you could find that you overspend on the project causing it to become financially unviable or result in the diversion of resources from other parts of your company. Conversely you could also under-spend on your website which may result in it lacking certain important features, being poorly coded, or built in a pre-made theme meaning your website design is not unique to your business.
Try to establish key milestones and deadlines, this will not only help the project stay on track but also prevent the project from expanding beyond scope which in turn adds extra cost. Having a clear timeline will also help with preparing content for the website, content (images, text, blogposts, etc) is the number one thing that delays a new website, often by at least a month.
By setting a deadline, you’re much more likely to get the content sorted promptly, meaning your new website could be ready a month earlier just from that one deadline.
Whilst it’s good to set milestones and deadlines it’s also important not to set deadlines that are unrealistic to feasibly be met. Try to avoid scheduling something for the minimum amount of time it could possibly take. Oftentimes there may be some form of in the website build delay due to unforeseen circumstances like an error that needs to be fixed or the developer may have to temporarily pause work on a particular piece of development as something urgent has come up.
On the other hand, if you set deadlines or milestones that are too loose then the work is unlikely to get treated as a priority as there’s either more time available for it to be completed, or if a milestone is too broad then it can be achieved easily and so it can be put off when the work could have been completed.
7. Example References and Inspiration
Try to find some examples of websites you admire the design of or really like a particular section of the website even if it is something small like the way blog posts appear on their blog page or the way a colour picker for a product works.
Even if you can’t immediately think of a website you’re particularly fond of, keep an eye out for anything you may like whilst just generally browsing the web. Additionally, have a look for any similar functionality that you want to include on your website.
Alongside providing a link to an example website, try to include some notes on why you like that particular site – is it a certain part of the functionality, or layout that particularly appeals to you? Or is it something like a particular transition, an animation or something decorative like a colour choice?
Providing these to your designer will greatly help them to create a site / design that is aligned with your vision, taste and preferences and would enable them to add extra design flare resulting in a more tailored and visually appealing outcome.
8. Discuss Ongoing Support Needs
Finally, one of the most important considerations as part of your website brief is what happens when the website is live. When done properly, a website is not something that you can just launch and forget about. A successful website is usually one which is regularly maintained and supported.
Consider what support you need when the site is finally launched. Will you be letting the agency support it or are you looking to support it yourself? A few points to consider are:
- Adding/editing content (text and imagery)
- Improving functionality
- Fixing bugs and issues
- Updating the software – the CMS and plugins/modules
- Keeping it secure – installing a firewall, enforcing 2FA
A common solution is you find a web agency who can support the technical aspects of the website but also support you in allowing you to edit and add content.
As part of your brief, if you plan to manage the site yourself make sure to include a requirement for a training session and future refresher sessions if needed. This training is crucial in you and your team being confident in updating the website.
If you need help with a new website, then why not get in touch with us and see what we can do for you.
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