Hey hey

We put a post up a while ago about the importance of a good design brief and promised we’d follow it up with how to write a design brief. Well, here it is. Smile

We’re lucky enough to work a wide variety of projects through our SEO and web design work and the most common thing that we find is that clients don’t actually know how to write a good design brief.

“Why should the client have to write the design brief?” you might ask. Well, it’s a fair question. The answer is that they probably shouldn’t, it’s what we do isn’t it; as part of our excellent web design service. True dat.

But, consider this; if the client knew how to write a good design brief, or even had the knowledge of what we needed to know as web design and SEO geeks then wouldn’t the end result (what the client is paying for after all) be much better?

Creative ninjas and web design clients – read on!

How to write a design brief

First up you need to ask yourself these questions as a client:

  1. What do I want my website to do?
  2. How do I want my company to be portrayed on the web?
  3. Do I have any specific goals (i.e. more sales, more qualified leads)?
  4. What are my competitors doing online and is it working for them?
  5. Do I have a plan or a (marketing) strategy for my website?
  6. What is my target audience?
  7. How do I want people to get in touch with me, and more importantly; why would they want to (why am I better than my competitors?)
  8. What does my company do? (Keep it simple, remember that not everyone knows your industry like you do)
  9. How does my company do it?
  10. How can what my company does benefit the people who visit my site and how can I tell them so that they take me up on point #6?
You get the idea – we could go on all day with questions like these; the crux of it is that you really need to spell out in the plainest terms possible everything about your company or organisation.
As a designer, understanding the processes of your business, how and why you operate like you do means that the first prototype web design that lands on your desk will be closer to your ideal website than if you’d not even considered the points above.
Take the questions above, add your own if required (these may be specific to your business) and write it all down in an orderly, readable and cohesive manner. Then bang it in an envelope (you remember those) and post it off to your designer. He or she will be chuffed that they got mail!

That’s not how to write a design brief!

Well, ok we haven’t told you to open up OpenOffice and what colour to make the text, but the core of how to write a design brief is there – you know your business so much better than us web design geeks do, so tell us all about it. We want to know.
Guaranteed – learning how to write a good design brief by just jotting down answers to the questions above will save you so much time in endless web design revisions.
We hope you give it a shot and if you’re a designer, copy the questions and let your clients take a look.
Let us know how you get on!

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