subject: Website Designing: How To Win Before You Start and Keep Winning [print this page] A design brief is a written explanation of the objectives you wish to achieve from your design. The design brief also covers milestones, possible problems, your design tastes and information such as target audience.
Most importantly of all, the design brief enables you and the designer to discuss any differences in opinions before any work takes place. Agreeing a solid design brief will save time and money further down the line.
This article outlines some of the most important factors to consider when writing your design brief for a new website.
Company Profile
Start your design brief with a short, honest synopsis of your organization or company. Don't take this information for granted, and don't assume that the designer will necessarily know anything about your industry sector.
Tell your designer:
What you do
How long you have been established and how many staff you employ
Do you have a niche market
How you fit in to your industry sector
Your Goals
Good design can have a huge influence on how successful your company is at achieving its goals. Deciding these goals from the outset and working towards them will ensure success. Working and deciding goals as you go along will only result in a half-baked idea that achieves relatively little by comparison.
For example, do you want to:
Generate sales?
Encourage enquiries?
Gain newsletter subscribers?
Obtain information from your audience?
Encourage them to tell a friend?
If your aims and objectives are not this clear, then your design brief has already achieved another purpose... One of most rewarding parts of actually sitting down and writing a design brief is that it helps to clarify your thoughts and can indirectly help to find flaws in what you initially thought was a solid idea.
Your Target Audience
Explain to your designer whether you are looking to encourage customer loyalty, appeal to new customers or both.
Detail any demographic figures about your audience that may be useful to the designer.
Recognizing your audience and how to target them; that is what design is all about. The design for MTV would not be suitable for CNN.
Your Budget and Time-Scale
It is important to realize that your budget is a feasibility factor, affecting the end product. The more development a design takes, the more it will cost. Again, by ensuring you have clearly defined your audience and goals will help the designer advise you on what is possible with your budget.
Time scale is also an important consideration. If you need a website to coincide with any other marketing, let the designer know the deadline.
Website Designing: How To Win Before You Start and Keep Winning
