By creating a Website Brief this means that you will fuller understand what you need and are looking for and can let your web designer know exactly what it is you are looking for so that your website is able to achieve the results that you are looking for.

What to think about before starting your Brief:

• What is it for?
• What can it deliver for your company

Create a Company Overview

By creating an overview can give some information on your company and explain your current situation to the Web Designer. Here are some things to think about:

• Give some information about your company such as what it does
• What is your companies Target markets
• What other ways do you advertise your company
• If you already have a website and some information about that
• The timescale for the project
• The Budget

Aims and Objectives of the website

Knowing your Aims and Objectives is important as this will let your web designer know what you are looking for your website to do and what goals the website should be achieving. Will your website be an online shop or an online resource? Also be clear on how you will measure how your website is successful or not. There are tools such as Google analytics that allow you to monitor how much traffic is going through your website.

Know your Audience

This is where you will state who your website will be aimed at. Here are some things to think about:

• Who is the main Audience of your company? – They will be a similar Audience for your website
• What do you want your website visitors to do? – Is it to get information about your company, contact you, buy your products?

Design Specification

This is how you want your website to look on the screen this should cover everything from the colours you wish to use to how the website is laid out. One of the best ways to do this is to have a look through the internet and have a look for website that you like the layout of and the general design of to help show your web designer how you would like it to look. The colours tend to be your own company colours like the colours that are within your company logo.

Things to think about for the general design:

• What elements do you want in the design of your website?
• Who is your design aimed at and will it appeal to that audience?
• Do you already have a set logo and colour scheme?

Website Content

The website content tends to almost become an afterthought for a website, but it is still a very important part of the website, as the right content can help increase your website goals from around 1% to 5% conversation rate.

Things to think about for your content:

• Your Company Background
• Company news or press releases
• Company client list or portfolio
• Your contact details do you need a location map or enquiry form
• How often will your content need updated and will it be done in-house? – If so this may require CMS for your website
• Who will be writing the content?
• Who will reply to the enquiries made from the website?

Functionality Specification

The functionality of the website will let your web designer know how you are looking for your website to work and how you want the website to be structured. The main areas to think about when writing up your website functionality are:

• The Navigation Structure. This will let your web designer know about what pages you want on your website and what levels of navigation you are looking for
• The Page structure. This will let your web designer know what you are looking for your visitors to do or see when they arrive on your home page

Technical Specification

The technical requirement of the website is to do with what program that the website is built in. If you have any specific website language that you require the website to be built in this is the place to mention it. Most web designers have their list of technologies that they are competent with such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS.

Website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation ensures that your website is found by search engines such as Google. This is very important indeed to help your website achieve the goals that you set for it. If your website is not Search Engine Optimised then it is not being found by users unless they already know the URL for the website.

You need to state here whither you will be doing the SEO for your website yourself or be looking to have your website SEO done by your web designer and also find out what types of SEO they offer and what they do for their SEO. If they do Organic SEO or Pay per Click SEO and don’t be afraid to ask how their previous SEO campaigns have worked.

For your SEO it is worth while doing some research for your Keywords your industry and also what the most popular keywords in Google are for you industry.

Accessibility and Usability

Accessibility and usability are two different things.

Accessibility is about making sure that your website is open to a wider audience such as blind people who use a screen reader would they be able to use your website more comfortably; this would mean that your website is more accessible to a wider audience. There are now website accessibility guide lines and levels that they fall under; this is created by W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative).

Usability is to do with how easy it is to use your website. How easy the user can get from A to B on your website. Visitors are looking for the easiest way to make it round your website so for buying a product on your website for example, how easy is it to find your products can you search for them, how quick can you buy a product after finding the and making it to the payment screen.

Deliverables

This is what the web designer must provide at the end of the project when it is being handed over to you after its completion. This could include:

• The Website itself
• Documentation on how to use the website or use the web designers CMS
• Information on the web designers hosting unless you have your own

Budget

Set a realistic budget. You should be aware that some website elements may take more time to create and will cost more. You cannot expect to get a £10,000 website for only £1,000. You can ask your web designer to provide a breakdown of the costs that are going to be incurred.

It is also worth while putting into your budget how much you are willing to pay for the website to be maintained each year, this could cover hosting costs, ongoing SEO costs, Website maintenance and updates.

Timescale

You can put within your brief a timescale that you would like the website completed and up and running. But if you are looking for a large website completed in a short timescale then you must be willing to pay more. It is usually best to agree a time plan with your web designer, as they will have built websites before and know how long it can take them to complete such a project.

It can be worth while saying who is supposed to do what by a certain timescale. If you are creating the copy for the website and it needs to be created before the website is finished.

Ownership

The Brief needs to state what you are taking ownership of for the items that are being created for the website and who will hold the Copyright for it.

Terms and Conditions

The terms and conditions should clearly outline what is expected of the web designer during the term of service, this should include items such as:

• Will they work on or off-site? – Most web design agencies have their own place of work
• How you will be paying? – In stages, in advance or on completion
• An agreed process for resolving conflict or disagreement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 10:28 am and is filed under Hints & Tips, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.