Great websites don’t happen by accident. It’s often the result of careful planning, meticulous research and a little bit of creative bravery.
Almost all new sites start with a website brief which sets out the requirements and expectations. A good designer and developer team will use this brief to help manage the client’s expectations. Overpromising the under delivering will leave everyone feeling sour.
Like an estate agent gathering your list of “needs” and “wants” for your dream home, a website brief does the same thing. You can then decide where you’re willing to compromise. For example, you can keep the client portal, but this means you can’t have the chatbot – unless you’re willing to increase your budget.
Your website brief should be unique to your organisation, so be wary about filling in a template. Unless, of course, the template is provided by the web design agency. In which case, be as detailed as possible when filling it in. When an agency goes to the effort to tell you exactly what they need to move forward, you’re only shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t provide it.
In this blog, we will run through some of the essential elements to include in a website brief. Running through this checklist should help to organise your thoughts and determine your goals for creating a new website.
We’ve also included an example below each section for a made-up yoga studio called “Rise and Shine Yoga”.
About your company
- How long have you been established?
- How big is the company?
- What milestones should the agency be aware of?
- What is your USP?
- What is your company personality?
“Rise and Shine Yoga was established 10 years ago by a husband and wife team. As we’re approaching our 10th anniversary, we want to mark the occasion with a new website.
Our current website is a WordPress self-build that has all of the basic information but doesn’t really tell customers who we are. We’ve also noticed a lot of other yoga studios use the same template, including one which has opened nearby. We want to avoid any confusion with a fresh new site.
We’re a family-friendly yoga studio that aims to be accessible to all and encourage everyone to give yoga a try once.”
Your customers
- Who is your ideal target customer?
- Where do they spend their time online?
- How will they find your website?
- What are they looking for on your website?
- If they can’t find what they need on your site, where will they go next?
“Our customers are not your typical yoga practitioners. They are turning to yoga to help with stress, to manage pain and to increase their flexibility. We welcome everyone from families with young children to stressed-out office workers who no longer want to be chair shaped.
Our customers find us through word of mouth recommendations, and by searching Google for nearby classes. We hope to open a second yoga studio in a different area, so we need to replicate the success we have had with local search marketing in a new town.
Our customers are looking for information about classes and reassurance that they have found the right studio. A lot of our competitors are offering online booking and a chatbot, so we need to be able to match this.”
Marketing plans
- What are the long-and-short-term marketing plans for your company?
- Which channels do you use for advertising?
- Do you manage marketing in-house or through another agency?
- How does your current website perform in search?
- Can you share analytics access or your most recent agency marketing report?
- Do you have a content marketing plan?
“We use Instagram and Facebook ads to reach people in our local area. Reviews are also essential for our business, so these need to be included prominently in the website design.
We work with a small SEO agency that also manages our PPC ads with a very limited budget. We, therefore, need to be able to easily create PPC landing pages with A/B testing capabilities.”
Your goals
- What is the purpose of the new website?
- What do you hope to achieve with a new website?
- What does success look like?
- What works with your existing website that you would like to retain?
- What doesn’t work with your existing website that you need to scrap or update?
“We want to keep up with the local competition and make sure our website reflects the welcoming nature of the studio. We are also opening a second location so we need to be able to offer online booking to get the ball rolling. We would also like to explore selling memberships, so individuals could purchase a block of classes or a monthly unlimited class membership.”
In-house capabilities
- How will you manage your website in the long term?
- Will you need a monthly maintenance package or will you manage this in-house?
- Do staff need to be trained to update the website?
- Will you provide photography or will you need stock photography?
- Will you provide content or do you need web copy?
- Do you have an established brand? Do you have a logo, colour scheme, typography?
- Do you have brand guidelines or will these need to be created?
“We’re not happy with the current branding and would like a complete refresh. We will need to update the blog and landing pages regularly and we can manage this in-house.
We have a vast library of images we can use and also have a photographer visiting the studio to get some new images in time for our 10th birthday. We’re happy with the existing website copy as we know it already ranks, but we’d be happy to expand this if required.”
Inspiration and Competition
- Who are your main competitors? What do they do that you like? And what do they do that you dislike?
- What look and feel do you want to achieve?
- Do you have any examples of websites you admire?
“We want the new website to be warming and bright. Our name is Rise and Shine Yoga, so we’re leaning towards sunrise shades of yellow, orange and red. We’d like a clean design with a clear hierarchy of information. The online booking feature and free trial class should be prominent on every page.”
Technical requirements
- What does the website need to do to succeed?
- Will you require any private portal functionality, such as a customer login?
“We would like to offer an online booking portal if possible, but we are also on a tight budget. We’re happy to discuss how this can be achieved cost-effectively. We’d also like to be able to easily update our timetable, as classes can change at short notice. We’re open to suggestions on the best way to achieve this. And finally, we’d like to be able to easily add videos to the site. We record free yoga flows for individuals to try at home, so we want to make sure we can easily update the latest videos.”
If you’re struggling to create a website brief, breaking it down into these steps and answering the questions above should help. Get in touch if you need more guidance on support for creating your next website brief.
