Is there such a thing as a brief design brief?

It helps to understand what you do. Include a summary of the services or products you provide. Describe to us the very DNA, values and company mission.

Try your best to describe the type of people that the website is targeted at. Describe what your ideal client looks like. This will help us design a site geared towards those exact people.

What are the overall aims of the new site? Most often we’ll see a mix of the following:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Improve online presence with a modern, and mobile responsive website design.
• Increase online exposure through natural and paid listings.
• Increase sales.
• Generate leads and enquiries.
• Improved source of information through e-learning or blogs.
• Bespoke requirements for clients i.e. bespoke platforms or services.

Who are your main competitors? We can look at what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. Which sites have great designs that you like? Take a look at things like layout, colour schemes, typography, photography, and unique tools or features. Try providing a list of links with reference notes for each of them.

Following on from looking at your competitors, think about how you'd like the site to look & feel. Pay attention to any nice user interface features you like. Do you like lifestyle photography or illustrations? How much of a free reign do you want our designers to have?

This section is very important for larger projects. In order to avoid scope creep later into the project (and additional costs) be as thorough as you can here:

• Does the site feature user logins? How will registrations be handled, authorised, and managed? What will be on the user dashboard? Describe every single bespoke feature that will be required.
• Is the site e-commerce? If so, describe product categories and variations, payment/checkout methods required, shipping cost calculations, shipping tracking, discount codes, any referral discounts, etc
• API Integration – Will the site need to integrate with any external feeds or APIs – if so, we’ll need thorough detail and actual examples of these.
• User profiles – What data will be included? What search criteria?
• Established institutions may have in-house coding guidelines – we’ll need to see these.

• News/Blog
• Social media feeds
• Discussion Forum
• Interactive Map
• Events section
• Online Bookings
• Portfolio Section
• Team Page

Describe how the site will be managed on a day-to-day basis. How regularly will you be updating and adding content? Will any form of data export be required from the site? Other than standard Google Analytics, do you need to gather any more ongoing data from the site?

Will you be providing new content for the site? If so, it will be a good idea at this point to plot a rough sitemap in your brief. How many pages will there be in total? Be clear on who makes up the team for producing this content, and what the approval process is. Supply of content is very often a sticking point in delaying website launches, so start considering this from day 1. What photography, illustrations or graphics are currently available?

Typically you’ll want your agency to host the site for you, alternatively, you may have other hosting arrangements – please detail these. How much ongoing support do you think will be required for the site? What might you need help with moving forward? (Any modern hosting setup should be secure, provide regular backups, and most of all provide a website that is fast)

So you finally set your amazing new website live, and you don’t get a single visit all year – because nobody knows it’s there. Digital marketing is absolutely vital to the success of your new website. If you already have marketing plans in place, it can be helpful to summarise them.

Sometimes a timescale might not be of importance – and the project can take as much time as it needs to get right. In other cases, there might be an absolutely vital deadline.

Include guideline budgets so that we can plan how your money can best be spent to achieve your website goals.