Writing a website brief is a necessary evil for most in digital marketing. Here's how to do it wonderfully.
A successful web brief distills complex information into a short, well-structured document. For a simple site we're talking 2 pages (or 4 sides) of A4, maximum, If you incorporate images or an appendix for tricky technical details, then you might go over this - but the point is that it should be easy to read and understand.
This step by step guide will enable you to write your website brief in under two hours. Sure, you’ll spend extra time locating logos and branding details from your marketing folder, and maybe researching other sites on the web or doing some quick Analytics analysis. But otherwise, we’ll get the bones of this cracked in double quick time.
Start your brief as if the designer doesn't know your company, even if they do. Aim for a concise summary of who you are and what you do. Just the facts.
This section needs to clarify the design ‘boundaries’ – what must you absolutely include visually, and what look and feel do you aspire to? This will give your designer both inspiration and clear constraints for your site design.
This is your opportunity to clarify who the site is aimed at and why they’d use it. This will help to define the site’s functionality and structure, as well as the tone of the content and the type of images.
Being clear about what success looks like for your website from the get go will give your designer a sense of the calls to action and visual nudges that are required. Take the opportunity to think about how you can improve your ranking in search - locally, nationally and/or internationally - so that this can be incorporated within the design and development scope.
It can be easy at this point to throw the baby out with the bath water . . . But, if you spend half an hour digging around in your existing site’s Google Analytics you can ask your web developer for suggestions on how to keep the things that work, whilst updating the experience in line with the rest of the website.
Finally, clarify the technical elements. This may sound like a step of geekery too far, but getting a handle on this can save you heartbreak further down the line. Maybe you are happy with your existing hosting set up, but it still worth checking these elements (read about why here).
Hopefully, someone in-house or your content marketing partner will be regularly updating the content but who’ll be responsible for updates to the Content Management System itself? It's the real geeky stuff, such as applying updates to WordPress / Drupal / Joomla / or whatever platform the website is built on.
That's it for the website brief!
Whether you are commissioning a simple five page site or a huge, multi lingual ecommerce website turning over millions, the website brief itself needn’t be that different. Being clear about what you want to achieve and who your audience is without too many preconceptions will give your designer scope to be creative. After all, it’s their creativity you're paying for!
After you’ve got the brief in place, the next step is to create a Site Plan. This is usually a separate spreadsheet which includes all the pages / page types and their purpose. This is of use to your designer and developer as it defines both the functionality and structure of the site as well as the pages that will need designs.
Given this often serves as a technical specification document, it’s sometimes easier to ask the web developer to create this as a kick off to the project (for complex sites they might charge up front to do this). So, leave this to the web dev geeks, because if you’ve chosen the right web developer, they’ll be able to inspire you with some awesome ideas at the start.
Want a little bit of inspiration right now? Download the guide below.
Image credits: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tattooed_Male_Underwear_Model_John_Quinlan_in_Lucky_Brand.jpg
Managing Director at Noisy Little Monkey, Nicola posts about Google Analytics and managing marketing teams.
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