If you are looking to hire someone to upgrade your existing website or make a new one from scratch, my number one tip for getting value for money is to invest some time in writing a good brief.
But sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, or what to consider. This blog is going to get you thinking about websites as a functional thing – what do you and your customers actually NEED it to do, rather than what you think it should be doing based on every other website. Providing something your rivals haven’t thought of is a great way to stand out!
Thinking more about what you want to achieve, while being open-minded about the exact functions and design is the best way to create a website that truly supports your business goals. If you choose to hire a web designer or consultancy they will be able to offer insight into what designs work best for your business type or which functions you might need.
Why Do You Even Need A Website Brief?
Before we look at what you should put in your brief, let’s quickly look at why they are important.
We’ve all had the experience of trying to pick which take away to order, and feeling overwhelmed by choice. Setting some ground rules and constraints, like it must be vegetarian, or offer a meal deal, actually helps you make a choice as unsuitable options are ruled out straight away.
You get a similar effect with a website brief. There are millions of possibilities for a website, with almost infinite options for colour schemes, layouts and content. By picking out the things that matter for you and your business goals, you can rule out a lot of stuff really quickly.
Secondly, if your brief isn’t clear and accurate, it’s easy to end up handing your website over to the wrong person. If you are lucky, you’ll pay top whack for someone with niche skills to do a basic job. Annoying, but you’ll at least get a working site. If you are unlucky, you’ll end up hiring someone who is quickly out of their depth, and then you’ll have to pay someone else to fix it.
Finally, a good brief shows that you are a serious client, and helps you judge the quality of the responses. Especially if you are inviting multiple pitches for the work, most reputable web professionals won’t even respond to a vague brief, as they’ll want to fully plan out and cost their proposal – impossible if the details aren’t there in the first place. As a client, it’s a massive red flag to get a generic or copy/paste response to a detailed spec. If someone isn’t taking time and care to read your brief now, they definitely won’t while working on it.
Ok, so now we know why we need to write a brief, let’s take a look at some questions you should ask yourself when thinking about your new website.
Know Your Audience
The first question you need to ask is Who are your users?
Obvious right? Your customers! But who exactly are they?
Different user groups have different preferences, needs and behaviours. You need to understand who they are, what they want, and how they interact with your business in order to meet their expectations and goals with your product. The same goes for your website – imagine your audience as you think about how to build it.
What devices they might be using – a mobile phone, a laptop, a computer? Are your users one well-defined group, or several different groups? For example, a site promoting a business service will be aimed at managers in their offices, using a laptop/desktop, and have lots of information about benefits and ROI so they can convince the budget holders to buy this service. Users of a baby product site will often be stressed parents juggling several things at once, and trying to complete their visit quickly, probably on a mobile. A college website needs to appeal to students, their parents and also work for existing and potential staff. Don’t be afraid to target a niche audience if that’s your ideal customer.
Purposeful Content
Next, ask yourself what do you want users to do on your site?
Online sales are the obvious choice, but is there something that would work better for you? Websites are great for creating a 24/7 online presence for your company – even outside of business hours, your website continues to find and secure customers.
Think carefully about what you want to achieve when a user visits your site. It could be making a purchase, booking an appointment, interacting with content by commenting or liking, or just finding out your shop address and opening hours so they can visit in person. Try to really put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about what they want to see.
If you really want to stand out in a competitive market, think big about what type of content you could have on your site, and how this compares to your competitors. Is text, images and maybe a couple of videos enough to differentiate you? Do you want to have downloadable content or a membership area? You can even think about things like product selectors, 360o virtual tours or customisable product visuals. These complex functions will increase the cost, but it may be worth it to get an edge over your rivals.
The Big Picture
A good way to think about what you need on your website is to look at the bigger picture: how does this feed into your wider goals?
Let’s look at a real-life example from one of our clients. They owned a grocery shop and wanted to build a site to sell their products online. However, the P&P was huge and alongside the time needed to carefully package orders, the idea was not very profitable. In this case, the client had looked at what other shops were doing without thinking how that actually fitted the realities of their business. We suggested they focus on click-and-collect orders instead; they were easier and cheaper to pack (you can trust the customer not to throw their wine bottles around, unlike a random courier!) and got people into the store, which also made it look busier and more interesting to passers-by. It is important to find a website strategy that works towards your purposes.
It’s also really useful to tell your web designer about your long-term plans, even if you aren’t ready to start work on them yet. Thinking ahead means they can put foundations in place for later – it is a better investment to build a site you can upgrade easily. No one wants to buy a whole new site when you finally launch your new service only to find the design is no longer compatible.
Feelings Matter
Another way to build your website is to think about your site’s personality. What feeling do you want to give your users?
Brand personality sounds like weird marketing speak, but it’s a really useful way of capturing the ‘energy’ of your site. Is it fun and friendly, serious, and reassuring, or maybe aspirational and high quality? A site for a lawyer will look completely different to the site for a toy shop. A furniture company making value items aimed at students/first-time renters will not use the same colour scheme, fonts and layout as a high-end furniture workshop making one-off bespoke pieces by hand.
Conversely, a site that makes users feel annoyed, frustrated or confused won’t get you many leads. Think about how your users might arrive at your site. Are they calm and happy and just browsing? Or are they stressed and rushing to find an answer? No one wants to sit through an unskippable promo video when looking at a hospital website to find out how to visit a sick relative.
Imagine you have your new website in place and are asking customers for feedback. What words do you want them to use when talking about your site?
The Less Design Rules the Better
Of course, branding plays a huge part in how your website is going to look – your brand logo, colours, and fonts are vital. However, anything else is debatable. Ditch the design must haves.
I can think of a couple of times I’ve built a site with carefully matched colours, layouts that lead the user through the content in the right order, and spent ages fine-tuning it to work on different screen sizes. Then the client says that they think the background colour should be changed, the layout should be across more columns, and that the image should be bigger. After a bit of back and forth, the client insists their changes get made. However, the site now looks terrible and the client has to pay for an extra round of edits to put it all back again…
If you already have brand guidelines in place, you can basically skip this section of the brief altogether; a good web designer will be able to pull what they need from your existing branding and translate it into a website.
It’s good to keep an open mind about how your site will look. User preferences may not match your taste, and accessibility and usability almost always trump fancy design. Your website is there to do a job, and a good web designer will incorporate that while also making it look great. Don’t pay a pro then do the design work yourself!
One More Thing…
Don’t forget to include some ballpark figures around your budget, and timescales, and be prepared to reconsider things once you start talking to potential designers or developers. You’ll get a very different set of proposals for a brief with a £1k budget compared to a £10k, so it’s worth being honest about how much you are prepared to invest from the start.
We can usually find a way to adapt your brief to fit your budget, but sometimes you might need to decide between dropping certain aspects or increasing your budget.
Ready To Get Started?
By considering all these questions when writing a website brief, you’ll have a good balance between providing enough details and becoming too prescriptive. You should also get back some appropriate and useful proposals that make the most of your budget and give you good value for money.
All of our packages include a kick-off call, where we’ll get to the heart of what your business needs from a website, so even if you aren’t feeling confident about writing a brief, we can still help. Get in touch to book a free intro call to find out more.
