Having a website plan for your new project can save you a huge amount of time and energy when you're looking for a digital marketing agency to help with a design or development project.
A good web project brief tells your design agency what you expect from this website, in terms of functionality, style and ultimate goals, and it gives them a starting point so that they can offer suggestions, advice and strategies that will achieve those goals in the best way.
This is also hugely helpful if you're planning for SEO or a digital marketing strategy, as it means that your website will be in line with your future efforts.
While getting in depth with your web design brief is great - you also need to remember that it is just a guideline.
No good agency will expect you to have a full plan, strategy and sitemap for your new site without any input from them.
Ideally what you want to create is a framework that you can flesh out with your digital agency and turn into a full plan for your website project.
All the steps:
If you've already got your website brief sorted, feel free to send it in to us, we'd love to take a look!
Background
The first bit of your website planning template should explain why you need a new website, as well as an outline of your business, your customers and this particular project.
Giving your agency an insight into your business, your customers and what you want to achieve is the foundation for a successful project.
About the company
Getting to know your company well enough to design a spectacular website can't all be done through the website brief, but it can create a great foundation to build on.
The essential things to include are a general description of who you are and what you do, some company history (especially if you've been around for a long time), and some information on who the main contacts for this project will be.
About your current website
Naturally you can skip this if you're working on a completely new project!
But if you're redesigning an existing site, it's really helpful to go into a bit of detail about what is no longer working with the old design.
It also helps to know what IS still working, and why you've decided to make the change now.
About the project
Not every project is a straight redesign of your main website.
You might be looking to build something for a new product, be breaking into a new market, trying to reach different customers or have a completely separate side project.
You may also be redesigning for a specific purpose, perhaps you're looking to start a marketing campaign or want the website to rank better. This is vital information for your agency as they need to know not just what you need, but what success in this project looks like to you.
About your competitors
Knowing who your main competitors are, having a look at their sites and seeing where they place themselves in the market is also really useful.
It's good to consider the things they do well as well as the things they aren't so great at.
By seeing what other companies are doing, your digital agency can start to get some ideas about how to make your site stand out.
Goals
The background information you give is definitely going to help establish some of the goals for this project.
But making sure you've got clear objectives for your new site is essential.
It's not just important for any web agency bidding for the work, but also for you to set some targets for success that you can review once the project is completed.
How are you going to know whether this project has been a success if you haven't identified what success is?
User personas
Customer profiles or user personas are a really important aspect of establishing your project goals. Knowing your target audience is the most important starting point for digital marketing.
Essentially you want to set out:
- Who your customers are
- What they're trying to do on your site
- What their motivations are (are they looking for the best price, most in-depth service, help, reassurance?)
You might only have one customer profile that covers everyone, but most companies will have a few different user personas.
As those personas are likely to have different motivations and goals when on the site, you'll need to do this exercise with each one.
Outcomes
Once you've outlined who your customers are and what they'll be looking to do on your site, it's also important to know what YOU want them to do - it's often not the same!
Your ultimate goal for the project might be to generate more leads, to get more direct sales, to provide online information that saves people phoning you, or maybe to create an online resource that didn't previously exist.
Whatever your goals are with this site, your digital agency will need to know before they can start understanding what your project needs.
Assets
Very often, content and assets are a bit of an afterthought when approaching a design project.
But a bit of thought that you can put into a website brief is not only going to help your web design agency understand the scope of what they need to offer you.
It will also prepare you for some of the essential tasks that you'll have to do before the project can be launched.
Planning Website Content
While no-one expects you to have a fully fleshed out content structure in your website brief, a bit of understanding of the current content, as well as any obvious gaps is going to be useful to know.
This will help establish whether the current content can be used as it is, needs reworking, enhancing or restructuring, or if you simply need to start again.
It will also be really important to establish who needs to be in charge of creating the content - will you want your agency to do this for you? Will you want them to give you a structure for you to flesh out? Or will you create the content in-house, and if so, whose responsibility will it be?
Branding
Do you have branding in place already? Do you have a style guide that needs adhering to?
Is your current branding mostly ok but feeling a little outdated or tired?
Let your agency know whether branding will be part of their remit, and whether it's a full rebrand, or some simple tweaks to modernise or organise what you currently have.
Naturally your brand has a huge impact on the design of the website, so it's essential to know what's going to be required.
Images
Knowing up front what your plan is regarding imagery (even if that's just to take the advice of your web designer), can be really helpful.
Whether you already have an image library, are going to be getting bespoke photography, want to use stock, or are interested in AI generated images, it's great for your designers to have an idea of what you already have, and what you'd prefer to use.
To find out more about how to source the perfect images for your site, have a look at our guide.
Functionality
This is probably the section that most people immediately think of when writing a website brief, as knowing what the site needs to DO is obviously a massive part of the project.
Development
You'll probably have a good idea of most of the functions you need, and it's great if you can provide a list of things that are essential to the site, as well as more of a wishlist of things that would be nice to have.
This is particularly true if you're creating a particularly functional website, web app or tool.
One thing to be very aware of here, is that you really are making a proper priority list. If your list of requirements has everything down as Priority 1, then you need to have a re-think.
We can guarantee that not everything you want to do will be essential, so don't paint yourself into a corner (and a very high quote!) by saying that everything is top priority.
When you've got your list or wants, would likes and wishes, your creative agency can then take a look and advise you on what they think will work best.
This could change based on who your customers are and what might work for them, but also based on your budget and how to make the most of your money.
If your website project is more of an online tool, you might not have a clear picture of how you actually need it to work, but you might have an outline of what you want it to do.
In this case it's often best not to make a list of functions, but instead you can provide a runthrough of what you expect people to be able to do through your app or website, or how you expect them to interact with it.
CMS
CMS stands for Content Management System, and this is the side of the website that allows you to edit and make changes to your website.
If you have a clear idea of what CMS you'd like to use already, then it's important to set that out in your brief and let your agency know why you were considering that particular solution.
But if you don't have any particularly strong feelings about what platform the site ends up on, it is helpful to include in your brief how much editorial control you expect to have on the site.
Lots of clients only really want to be able to update basic text on the site, and modify any editable areas, like your products, blog posts or case studies, for example.
But sometimes clients need a deeper level of editorial control, for example, to be able to build new pages using the existing design styles, or add new plugins to the site.
Knowing how you expect to edit and develop the site over time also helps your agency guide you to a CMS that's going to work for you, so that's great information to put into your website brief.
And if you're looking to explore CMS options, have a look at our article of CMS statistics to find more about the most popular and trending solutions.
3rd party integration
Occasionally clients have external systems or software that need to integrate with their site.
Always make sure you list these out in your website brief, and let people know how they're going to be interacting with your site.
For example, do you need your contact form to feed information into your CRM, do you plan to use a 3rd party booking service to list your courses, or do you want your vacancies to push information through to services like Monster?
If a web design agency knows about the software you're using up front, they can check they can integrate with that system - which might also impact their advice about a CMS.
Design
This is actually the easiest section of all!
When you're writing the creative brief for a website, all you really need to do is let your digital marketing agency know if you have any strong likes or dislikes in design.
It just saves them putting together a dark, moody concept for you, only to find out that you're passionate about clean colours and white space.
Showing a few examples of websites you like, and the reasons you do can be a really straightforward way to give your agency a bit of an idea of what you're after.
Remember that you don't want to be too proscriptive with this. Your agency should have an understanding of good website design, and it is their job to make the design decisions.
But make sure they know if you have any particular likes or dislikes, as that will factor into their decision making, so they can design something that you love as much as your customers do.
Ongoing
Knowing a bit about how your expectations for what happens AFTER your website has been launched is also really helpful.
Hosting
Lots of people prefer their design agency to also handle their website hosting, but some clients already have their own setup that they'd like to keep in place.
Let your digital agency know if you plan to use your own hosts and try to provide access to the hosting service as soon as you can
This saves lots of time when the site is ready to launch. You don't want to get to the end of the process and then be waiting for weeks for your hosting company to release details to your web agency!
Digital Marketing
Your marketing strategy is a really important part of your website's success.
If you expect your digital marketing agency to play a part in the ongoing marketing support of your site, including ongoing Search Engine Optimisation, make sure that's in your website brief.
If you've not thought about SEO and ongoing marketing, maybe have a quick read through our Getting Started with SEO guide, which explains all the basics of what it is and how it works.
Support
Most digital agencies will have web maintenance contracts or other services that are available to you once your site goes live.
It's not necessary to ask for these upfront, but it's good to know whether you expect to be needing regular developments and updates, or whether you expect the site to tick along nicely without too much input from your agency.
Essentials
And lastly we come to the most important pieces of information for your website brief. Time and money.
Timescales
9 times out of 10 you just want your website as soon as possible, but if you have specific deadlines, a product launch or special event coming up that you want the website to be ready for, you need to let people know up front.
If you have a really tight deadline for the work you need, a digital agency might suggest a different working pattern for you, with a Minimum Viable Product ready for your deadline, and growing the site afterwards.
Budget
No-one ever wants to give a budget for their website, but even a rough idea, or a maximum figure really helps an agency understand what your expectations are.
It can be the difference between you wasting hours of your time in meetings that never amount to anything, or employing a digital agency that doesn't really meet the standard of work you're looking for.
If you need more convincing - have a read of our article why should I provide my budget for some additional persuasion!
A complete picture
Writing your website brief shouldn't feel like a chore; in fact, it's an opportunity.
This is your chance to evaluate and understand what you expect from your project, and can really help you understand your own requirements before speaking to a digital agency.
