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If you are thinking about commissioning work on your existing or new website, you’re going to want to write a brief to give to your developer/designer at some point so they know what you want. Here are some topics to get you thinking in the right direction and help you do just that.

What do you need a website for?

It may sound like a daft question, but it is at the top of the list for good reason. Even if you have an existing website, ask yourself the same question again. What do you need it to do for you? What are your short and long-term business goals? Do you need to raise awareness of your product? Increase sales by widening your audience? Get your brand message across to a new audience? Once you’ve really know what it needs to do, we can start to think about how we can achieve it… This question will help us define what the key design and functionality needs to be.

Your Audience

When creating a design for a website, we serve two masters - the client and the audience. This can be a tricky mix as what the client thinks they want can be very different from what the audience actually wants. The obvious way to bridge the conceptual gap is to talk to both groups of people. Although the evidence to do audience research is compelling, it can be difficult to persuade a client that this is really is worth investing in. However, it will pay for itself in the short term. The more information we can gather about your audience, the better chance we’re going to deliver what they want. Who are they, what do they want from you, what can you offer them, how old are they, what matters to them, what other websites do they go to etc. One we understand your audience, we can prioritise their needs and balance these against the available budget.

Look & Feel

If we are working on a new website that has no precedence, we’re going to spend more time working on the look and feel. This is where we will try and pin down all the key aspects of a site in a set of mock ups. We will create design flats to demonstrate colour usage, layout, typography, imagery. In some cases will also demonstrate some key functionality to test how the interactivity really ‘feels’.

In this phase of development, what we want from the client is for you to give us a whole load of stuff that you do and don’t like for us to throw into the pot. These could be a list of other websites that you’ve seen, but they could just as well be anything: a photo you have that captures a mood you like; a bus ticket that uses a particular colour you noticed; a napkin with an interesting texture on it - anything!
The more you feed in at this stage, the more you’ll feel you influenced the outcome.

Navigation & Site Architecture

OK, so what’s going to be on your website? What’s it going to do? See if you can sketch out the main chunks of what you want to communicate and group them together. You can work through the intricacies of the journeys between pages later on… If you can come up with succinct titles for the main sections all the better. Keep it simple though – remember your audience may not know anything about your products or services. If you’re going to make them work hard and have to think ‘I wonder what that’s all about, you’ve lost them.

Screen Size

You need to consider the screen sizes of your audience. Are you designing for mobile access? Perhaps your users are in an environment where they have a lot of old equipment? The prevailing trend is to design for a screen size of 1024 x 768 pixels. Refer to W3 Schools for further information about browser statistics. In either case CSS is going to have to be your new friend.

Day-to-day Management

Be warned - your website might eat you!
Do not be under the illusion that your website is just going to sit there working for you without needing attention. Like a small child it has needs - can you manage to look after them all? You’re going to need to be able to deal with enquiries from the website promptly, maybe update your stock or news regularly and make sure your customers know there’s going to be someone there to help them should they need it. This all needs to be taken into consideration when you come to think about what your website is going to offer. There’s no point in having a news section if there’s no time to keep it updated. Maybe you’ll need to consider image/audio/video resourcing too - it all takes time.

You also need to consider whether you need a content management system (CMS) to help run the whole thing or you want an agency to manage the website for you. There are pros and cons with both and the trade-off centers on costs vs control and functionality. If you want to dip your feet into this area why not sign up for a blog? Go to blogger.com or wordpress.com or any other service provider and sign up for one. They are usually of excellent quality and can do some really good stuff. There are lots of add-ons you can get for free to make your website do more stuff - even add in e-commerce ability. This is all great if you are technically minded, have lots of time on your hands to learn how to do it. If you’re really up for it, head over to Open Source CMS where you can try loads of Open Source CMSs out for free.

Budget

It all comes down to the budget in the end. Creative work is a moveable feast and iterations of design work takes time. The only way to manage your budget is to carry out all the tasks above and be as specific as you can be. There is always going to be a balancing act between scope and costs. If you have prioritised you needs, this task is much easier to undertake.

We often get asked to quote for work where the budget is not revealed. In a lot of cases, this is a waste of time for both parties. If we don’t have an idea of your budget, we’ll spend a lot of time trying to second guess the scale of your requirements. We don’t need an exact figure, but a good indication of your available budget is going to make a significant difference. Usually when we ask this question, the initial answer is ‘I don’t know’. You may not know where the costs come from when building a website, why should you, but you’ll probably have a good idea of how much you think you want to spend on it. If we know what your requirements are and what you can afford to spend, we can work out the best way to achieve this in the most cost-efficient way. In lots of cases, clients don’t have the budget to cover the costs of their complete vision in a lump sum. However, by staging the development and payments over time, we can ease the financial hit - at the same time you’ll have a more informed opinion of where the next stage of development should focus.