Introduce Yourself

You’ve spent lots of time researching which web designer to employ. Now its time to tell your web designer a bit about you. Its really important to tell a bit of back story and conjure up an accurate image of who you and your company is.

• Explain who your company is and what its values are.
• What does your company sell, products? Services? Write briefly about what your company produces.
• How big is your company? Give some information about the size and structure of your company.
• What markets does your company supply? Is your company UK based, Europe or perhaps Global?
• What is your company’s history? How long have you been doing what you do. Give a brief timeline.
• Try to describe your company in single words. Try and give approximately a dozen words.

Analysis Of Your Current Assets

So far you have introduced your company and given some background information. Your web designer now knows a little about you. Now its time to explain what your designer has to work with. Outline the assets your company has in place, don’t worry if you don’t have a site already, that’s just as important to explain.

• Do you have a web site already? If so explain where it can be found.
• What does your company like about the web site it already has. How has it succeeded?
• In what way would your web site benefit from improvement, are there any specific areas of the site which have not worked or performed as desired?
• How old is your site? Was it built in house, or did you employ someone to do it. Do you still have any details from that project which you could present?
• Do people visit your site? If so present some of the statistics here, your designer will need that information as it will impact upon how the site is built.
• Is your site used as a sales tool? If so how effective has it been? Has it become more or less effective. Use of web sales statistics would be helpful.
• Who is responsible for updating the site? What are their skill levels etc?
• Add any further details which will be of interest to the designer.

Goals Of Your New Site

If you are to get the best out of your designer you need to be sure about what the goals of your new site are. In addition to this, you must outline the features you expect, the feel of the site and what role you see the site taking. This should be easily done by now as you will in an earlier guide worked out you’re your clients are, what they need and how it is to be delivered.

• What is the goal of your site? Why will it exist?
• Who is the target audience? Has your client changed or developed since the last site was built? Describe who your client is so you designer can have them in mind when designing the site your customer will use.
• Does your company have other assets, or marketing material which the web site will have to tie in with. How important is continuity? Do you have a corporate style which must be followed?
• What is the unique value position (UVP) of your company and/or the product/service they are selling?
• What sites will yours be competing with? Provide some examples.

Style & Continuity

It is really important that visitors to your web site find something which is familiar. What I mean by this is that the web site should reflect the corporate style your company uses, familiar colours, logos, fonts etc. Any advertising, marketing material including the most basic items such as letterheads and business cards need to tie in with the style of your web site.

Have you seen other web sites which you like? Where you have real world examples of things you like its very helpful to be able to say to your designer, “ oh I really like the catalogue system used by IKEA on their UK web site “ or “I love the minimalist design of the New Tate Modern web site”. Try and give half a dozen examples of sites you like, remembering to explain what it is you like about each one in particular.

To assist the designer in this process it is so very useful to provide him/her with copies of your current marketing materials, business cards etc. Include them with this brief as a guide to how the web site should be styled.

Do you have any content which is ready to be put into the web site? Are your intentions to use the text from your existing web site or to write new and vibrant copy for your new project? If you don’t have text already produced then do you have the staff or agency that can produce text for you? It will help your designer greatly to receive a few pages of sample text. Its really important for the designer that he knows how word heavy your site is going to be as this can greatly affect the structure of the site.

Technical requirements

Do you have any special technical requirements? This may sound a bit vague and perhaps unimportant, but there are going to be some fundamental things about your web site which fall into this category.

For example, is your web site going to be produced for use internally on a network (an intranet), or is your site going to be produced for consumption by the public (internet site). If your company is producing a site designed as an intranet are there specific things which need to be communicated, ie. Does your company run a windows pc network or an alternative? Is there any specific technology/software which is to be integrated or accessed through the intranet site?

Conversely, if your site is to be an internet site, does your target market have any specific requirements or technical limitations. For example, is your target audience in a developing country which may use slightly older computers, software and monitor sizes?

Do you intend to remain with your current hosting company for your web site or start a new contract with an alternative? Do you have a preferred supplier for such services and if you do, do they run windows or linux servers? Are you restricted to which languages can be used on your server?

Aftercare

Many people and indeed large company's have a tendency to launch a new web site and then completely fail to support it after that point. A web site is organic in the sense that its success and its rankings in search engines depend heavily on the site being frequently updated.

Often a site isn’t updated for the simple reason that a company doesn’t have the staff to dedicate to providing small and frequent updates. The task gets set aside and ultimately forgotten until one day it is mentioned that the web site isn’t performing.

Who is going to be responsible for updating your web site? Do you have staff who will be providing content on an ongoing basis? Its quite possible for example that you have plenty content but you lack a staff member with sufficient IT skills to be able to update your site. This is in itself not a problem if it is addressed. You could for example use an external contractor like myself to make frequent updates to your site. This is a cost effective way of keeping your site fresh and useful to your customers without the burden of having to employ, or re-task an existing employee to carry out the role.

Promotion

Once your site is active, and probably, some time before that point you will be considering how to promote your new web site.  What ways will be best for you? What methods will reach your customers?

This is not something you will really need to pass on to your designer but is worth considering. When your business cards are reprinted, put your web address (URL) on them too. Add your web site to letterheads, invoices, you name it!  Link all aspects of your business to your web site and it will commonly become a much visited resource.

In the early days of your web site being launched it can take a while for the site to feature in search engine rankings. There is always a bit of a time delay between a site being launched and it being listed as there is a long queue of sites to be checked.  In this period it can often be very helpful to consider some kind of advertising to initially drive traffic to the site.  Give some thought to how you wish to promote your site and record the results in the design brief.

There are many traditional methods of advertising such as email marketing, forums, banners etc. However, modern trends are to use social networking sites such as twitter, facebook and others.

Conclusion

At the end of your brief you should conclude by summarizing the points you have made and outline in detail what you expect of your designer. What information do you need communicated back to yourself and when by?  What are your deadlines for the project?  It is typical for a designer to return a full proposal to you which will give you enough information to manage not only the time elements of your work but also the budget elements.

You will find many more guides available on this site which will go into much more depth about topics such as “who your customer is” and “how to assess your existing web site”. I thoroughly recommend reading them as you embark upon your project.

As always, if you wish to talk in more depth about anything relating to web design please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me by phone, email or using the contact form on the web site.

I wish you well in your endeavours.

For More Help...

Thank you for printing out this page. I hope that its useful. If you would like more information or simply want to have a chat about your project, please dont hesitate to get in touch. Contact me, Paul Edwards on 07971 244021.