I have seen many briefs come and go, but good ones — never. And when you explain the why and how, people say they are not obliged to follow it, that it just gives some guidance… So why bother making one then? Let us look together at what you should do for a good brief.
What You Should Definitely Not Do When Writing a Brief
Above all, do not specify anything about the visual and technical side. When writing a brief, you tell yourself that at least you have some form of protection. The problem is that if you specify the font, the colour, the hosting you want, and other things, you are doing our job for us. And you do not know what is best. No, OVH hosting for a WordPress site is definitely not a good idea. No, that colour on top of your other colour — colour-blind users will not be able to read your text. We have a much better vision than you do, and beyond the mistakes you might have us make — as simple as those I have just cited — you would also destroy all the creativity of your web agency or that of your freelancer.
So How Do You Write a Good Brief?
There are 2 solutions for creating a good brief:
- Create the brief directly with your freelancer or agency
- Create a brief on your own, but do it properly
If you choose the 1st option, all you need to do is find your website creator. If you prefer to scope out the project before contacting your service provider, then you are in luck — that is exactly what we will look at next.
By the way, nothing stops you from scoping your project before contacting your service provider, and then finishing the brief together with them.
Creating a (Good) Brief
To start, introduce your company:
- Founding date
- Main activity / services or products
Optional:
- Number of employees
- Annual turnover
- Main development areas
- Main competitors
1. Overall Project Definition:
- Does your site need to be multilingual? (be careful — do not request a multilingual site without a clear objective and if you do not have the budget).
- Is your website an online shop? (e-commerce site).
- What payment solutions need to be integrated?
- What are the specific features? (user accounts, private areas…) ?
If you feel the need to specify that your site must be responsive, in my opinion you should choose a different service provider. It is important that your brief is concise. If it is 500 words, it is 500 words and that is perfectly fine.
2. Visual Identity
Add to your brief all documents relating to your company’s visual identity if it already exists — otherwise ask your service provider to create it! (colours, font, logo, design rules, etc.).
And give examples of sites you like, specifying why if possible.
3. Specifications
Specify your expectations and the specific deliverables the service provider must also cover:
- Host your website
- Ensure maintenance
- Training on how to use the back office
- Integrate third-party services (a CRM for example)
- What solutions will be used with your website (Frameworks, templates, etc.)
Note: if you do not know what a CRM is, take it slowly and do not force yourself to ask for everything and anything. It is pointless.
4. Timeline and Deadline
Providing a schedule for the completion of tasks is practical, even if both parties will not always be able to meet every deadline — it will help nonetheless. The most important thing is to provide an end date (deadline).
Example:
- Date for creating and approving mockups
- Date for creating and approving content
- Date for creating and approving the site
- Testing dates
- Launch date
5. Protecting Yourself
Write the information you want to see appear in your service providers’ quotes.
- Breakdown of tasks for an hourly/daily rate (itemised day rate)
- Schedule (especially the deadline)
- If you want a fast site
- Website SEO
- Website hosting management
- Training teams on back office use
Note: If you add all the objectives the quote will become expensive. For example, basic on-site SEO may not increase the budget if the site is well-built. If you also want off-site and technical SEO, it can easily reach €5,000 for an average keyword. If you include everything in your quote and the creation of your site ultimately costs €1,000, nothing will work — that is a promise!
6. Personas / Target Audience:
Write the profile of your company’s customers and/or the profile of your website visitors (personas).
Example: We target a young audience between 15 and 28 years old. The ideal profile being men with a household income above €3,000, with video games as a passion… (a persona goes into much more detail, also describing what concerns them and much more).
(7.) Specify Objectives for a Website Redesign
Probably the most important point for a website redesign. State as clearly as possible the objectives for your future website.
Example: Improve the current conversion rate, improve the visibility of the existing site, etc.
Here is a non-exhaustive list:
- Current statistics (monthly traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate)
- What volume of traffic are you aiming for on your site?
- What volume of enquiries are you aiming for on your site?
- The number of pages to add
- …
Without forgetting to specify the current state of the site:
-
The programming language currently used
- The version of the language
- The hosting used
- The type of site (business, e-commerce, platform, etc.)
- The payment methods used
- The plugins used
- Documents relating to the existing visual identity
- The number of people involved in this project
- What are the elements to keep and those to remove?
- …