Building a new website for your business is always an exciting prospect – moving away from the constant complaining about your current site and finally getting a new site that’s easier, faster and better. However, that’s sometimes also as far as the thinking goes when you decide to take the plunge and find a web development agency: Please build me something better. If you’re the unlucky soul tasked with getting the project started, you quickly realise that “please build me something better” doesn’t get you very far.
Getting a new website built is pretty techy and parts of it can just totally go over your head. Having to think about things you’d not considered before and trying to get to grips with all the jargon. And then there’s the design as well: decisions on colour palettes, branding, images, fonts. It can be quite overwhelming. But as long as there are few key things you consider initially, you can build a great brief for your agency and kick start the process with a bang.
Below are a couple of diagrams with thought starters to help you begin shaping a brief. Starting with the technical side of things, try and shape your brief into these five areas:
Then comes the design section, with similar themes to get you starting to think about the right things:
Of course, there is going to be a lot to expand on when it comes to discussing with the developers and designers who will be working on the site but separating your thoughts as above, is a great place to start and will trigger all the right conversations.
The most important thing to remember when it comes to writing a brief for a website is that you don’t need to use all the technical jargon. A good brief is one that’s full of information: about your current site and your objectives for your new site; opinions about other sites you’ve seen that might help to paint the bigger picture and even including questions that you don’t know the answers to, but might give a bit of helpful context.
Regardless of how big or small the project might be, separating the brief into sections and thinking about some of the questions above is a great way to start.
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