How to Write a Spotless Web Design Brief to Get the Design You Want
Nowadays, many clients don’t even consider purchasing products or services from a company if it doesn’t have an informative, fully-functional website with easily accessible and intuitively organized content. Thus, contracting high-quality web design services can have a huge positive influence on the success of a business or content platform.
To build maximally impactful websites, it is imperative to convey your vision correctly and fully to the designers that will work on the project. This is typically done through web design briefs – documents that encompass key information and requirements stated by clients and intended to serve as a guide for web designers. Below, we list the details that need to be specified when writing such documents.
Key Information to Include in a Web Design Brief
1. Background Information about the Project and the Company
This is the section that allows designers to understand your project and its context. The following types of information could be relevant in this section:- What are the company’s history, specialization/ niche, the size of its staff, client base, or annual revenue, its mission, values, uniqueness, past accomplishments, etc.?
- Is the website intended for a standalone entity or for a part of a larger entity (for instance, a faculty within a university), that has its own framework and guidelines?
- Why did the need for this project appear exactly?
- Should the website be built from scratch or an already existing website should be redesigned?
- What is your vision of the website and its importance for your business or brand?
- Is there any evidence about consumer expectations and how this website should address them?
2. The Audience
State who this website is aimed at. Mention everything that you think is relevant about your audience: the categories of users, their age, ethnicity, interests, values, beliefs, goals, tastes, lifestyle, geographical area, necessities, expectations from the website, the actions they need to perform using it, the expected pattern of interaction with it. Knowing your audience is among the universal recommendations for increasing conversion rates generated by your content.
3. Goals, Objectives, and Scope
List the goals, the objectives that build upon these, and everything this website should achieve or help with. If you are unsure whether certain goals or necessities of your business can be addressed by the website, it is still wise to list them – it might be possible to identify full or partial solutions for many of these issues. Plus, it will help picture more clearly your expectations and the necessary directions of action.
Depending on the type of the website, the specific goals/ objectives could be to enable purchases by clients, to inform on any imaginable topic, to offer a platform for debate or for voting, to enable communication with the fans, to share ideas or findings, to synchronize actions and events, etc. Note that this section should be both very concise and precise with no place for subtilities or wordiness. It is also no place for suggestions or solutions.
4. Goals, Objectives, and Scope
Even if most of the content could be uploaded later, it is important to specify at this stage the types of content that your website is expected to host. Lots of photo galleries mean that the website should be adapted for image viewing. Having the possibility to scroll through documents without downloading them would require file viewer plugins meant for the corresponding file formats. Other requirements would apply to audios, videos, interactive charts. Even text content can vary greatly (news, RSS feeds, quotes, research articles), requiring entirely different design templates and formatting styles. Also note, that the design should serve the content, not the other way round.
Nowadays, posting new content regularly is essential in maintaining online visibility and outreach since it helps to keep a constant user influx, including from social media platforms. If you want your website to have frequently updated rubrics with tons of new content generated regularly, consider recruiting a dissertation writing help service that will provide you with the desired type of content: motivational articles, science or technology news, sports reviews, reflective essays, etc. They can also edit or proofread any content forwarded to them, which could also prove highly useful.
5. Design Requirements including Technical Ones
Here, you should present the visual identity system – in other words, the logos, colors, and fonts used by your company or organization that are used to represent the brand so that designers can use them consistently throughout the site. No worries if you lack any of these since many graphic design services can create your brand’s visual identity from scratch, including the logo, package, or presentation design. Apart from that, you should list the technical requirements, constraints, or desired specifications for your website. Curiously, there are some cognitive psychology tricks that you could employ to your benefit.
Feel free to specify desired text formatting styles and to provide examples of templates. If the texts will be written by a brand offering essay writing services, then formatting requirements can be confirmed with them in advance. Let this service know exactly what type of texts you expect from them – formal vs. informal, creative vs. documented/ evidence-based, etc.
6. Expectations About Ongoing Website Management
Here, you should present the visual identity system – in other words, the logos, colors, and fonts used by your company or organization that are used to represent the brand so that designers can use them consistently throughout the site. No worries if you lack any of these since many graphic design services can create your brand’s visual identity from scratch, including the logo, package, or presentation design. Apart from that, you should list the technical requirements, constraints, or desired specifications for your website. Curiously, there are some cognitive psychology tricks that you could employ to your benefit.
Feel free to specify desired text formatting styles and to provide examples of templates. If the texts will be written by a brand offering essay writing services, then formatting requirements can be confirmed with them in advance. Let this service know exactly what type of texts you expect from them – formal vs. informal, creative vs. documented/ evidence-based, etc.
7. The Timeline of the Project and the Budget
Feel free to specify a date by which the website should be functional, as well as the deadlines for specific milestones if you want greater control. As for the budget, naming a price range would ensure that the quotes you receive are more or less the same and easily comparable.
But this can motivate certain candidates to artificially increase the price including unnecessary services, while others would exclude otherwise valuable services to save on the costs. Hence, the alternative could be to not mention the price but to request a cost breakdown nevertheless.
8. The Expected Format of Proposals
Mention what format you expect the proposals to be in and what do you want them to include. It would make sense to request the inclusion of a portfolio of past projects and a few references from former clients, a project completion timeline with corresponding milestones, a breakdown of the costs, a work strategy, the range of technical skills the agency’s employees possess, etc.
It’s Not Set in Stone
You should understand that a design brief is essentially like a job announcement – you state your expectations, but you are still free to see who the candidates are and what they offer. Many aspects are not fixed, the project would evolve and would be adapted through collaborative work. If at some point, you realize that you don’t have a clear vision regarding the design of your website, try to browse through portfolios of completed projects and case studies – these are true repositories of creativeness and offer plenty of inspiration.
