Have you come up with creative web design ideas for your website? That’s great. Now you should put your thoughts on paper and write a comprehensive website design brief. You should explain to web designers what precisely they should do to recreate the design you have imagined.
Have you never written web design briefs before? Here is a step-by-step guide for you.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Introduce yourself
The first step is a simple one. You need to explain to web designers who you are, what you do, and for what purposes you are going to use your website.
If you work in eCommerce, you should provide designers with such information:
- Description of your eCommerce business: niche you work in, size of your company, its brief history, etc.
- Description of your product
- Your marketing goals
- Information about competing companies and links to their websites
The more web designers will know about your business, the more appealing design they will create. If designers ask you to provide additional information regarding your company, be patient, and answer all their questions.
Create a project overview
The second step is to explain why you want to start this website design project and what results you expect to achieve. Here are a few questions that must be answered:
- Are you building something brand new or just want to “refresh” the old look of your website and your brand?
- What is your primary purpose? Do you want to drive more traffic to your website, improve customer loyalty, enhance brand identity, keep up with the competition, etc.?
- Do you want to be involved in the project and communicate with a team of web designers on a weekly basis? Or are you busy with other tasks and are interested in the final results only?
- What difficulties or issues have you faced with your current website, if any?
- What possible difficulties or obstacles you want to overcome in the future?
Describe your website visitors
Now you need to define your target audience, its needs, and preferences. In your brief, you should provide written answers to the following questions:
- Who will visit your website? Define the demographics of your target audience: age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, etc.
- What attitudes people have toward your brand? What feelings and associations do you want them regarding your website? Do you want to make people feel excited, happy, enthusiastic, etc., about visiting your website and interacting with your brand?
- What aesthetic preferences does your target audience have? Do they like minimalist designs, sophisticated fonts, neon or nude colors, etc.?
- What are your target audience’s likes and dislikes about your competitors’ websites?
Visualize your ideas
At this stage, you should explain how you want your website to look like. Preferably, you should use screenshots to visualize your ideas.
First and foremost, you should present the basic concept of your future website. You should choose from three to six websites that appeal to you, take screenshots, and add them to your brief.
For instance, you can add the following image and write that you like “minimalistic black-and-red designs.”
After that, you should detail and specify your preferences regarding different design elements, such as CTA buttons, fonts, icons, and menu bars.
Take a look at the following screenshot. It’s a simple example of how you can communicate your ideas to web designers in a simple way.
https://avone-demo.myshopify.com/
https://www.akomaskincare.co.uk/
https://www.welleco.co.uk/
If you don’t have any specific preferences, specify it in your brief. Let designers know that you fully trust them and allow them to choose any icons, buttons, and fonts they find suitable.
Set a deadline
When do you expect to start using your new website? In three months or two weeks? Set a deadline to make sure that web designers will deliver the project on time.
If you hire web designers from another city or country, make sure to specify the due date and the time. For example, you can write that the project must be completed on January 10th, 11 a.m. EST. It will help you ensure that you will not experience any delays with launching your website and running your marketing campaign.
Proofread your web design brief
The perfect website design must be perfect in any aspect, including grammar. You should proofread the text meticulously and correct all typos and grammar mistakes.
Why is it so important? Firstly, a well-written document will make a good impression on a team of web designers. Secondly, it will help you to prevent possible miscommunications caused by a misspelled word or misplaced comma.
The best way to proofread business documents is to use the best academic writing companies or AI-powered grammar checkers. Yep, even if you believe that you have high writing and editing skills, you still should consider getting proofreading help.
Use proper formatting
There is nothing worse for web designers than reading a website design brief that’s just a wall of text. So please, try to format your document in a proper way. Use headings and subheadings for different sections and add bulleted lists where possible. Make the text readable and easy to scan through.
Define your project budget
Finally, you should discuss the payment issue. You should define your project budget and specify when and how you will make payments.
Web designers want to know when they will get paid and how much money they will earn for the work done. So you can’t skip writing this section.
Also, we want to remind you that budget setting is important to you in the first place. You should calculate how much you can afford to invest in website design and what returns you will receive. Don’t spend money on web design just for the sake of it. If you are not sure whether you will profit from it, you should cut the budget or choose to invest in another project.
In conclusion
Now you know how to create a perfect web design brief from scratch. So don’t hesitate to take the next step and jump into writing – craft a comprehensive brief to help web designers to build the site of your dreams.
