It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room – the impact of a ‘bad’ brief.
Writing a brief can seem really daunting – especially when you are not a designer or coder yourself. But trust us, it doesn’t need to be a huge document that strikes fear into your marketing team as they try to wrangle the countless wants, needs and opinions from the finance team, senior leadership, sales execs and your best friend who just doesn’t like the site.
Avoid the panic and keep it simple.
Don’t sweat the small stuff! Adding every possible goal, detail, want and desire will confuse and complicate the responses you get. Trust the agencies responding to do the creative thinking bit and instead focus in – why are you building a new site? That should give you the overall goal. Of course it needs to X and Y and Z along the way but don’t get too fixed on those because they are not your overall goal.
Identify your target audience and put them front and centre. It’s ok for one of the audience to be your company, but remember thats just one group and 99% of website are focussed on conversion of some kind and your team are already converted! It’s also worth noting here heirachy is incredibly important – you might have 10 user groups but the site can’t whistle and dance for all of them across all of their needs and neither should it. Some pre-work on who the main site audience is will really give you a great head start on the work.
Here’s where you shouldn’t got top line and the detail will really help. Specify essential features, functionalities and integrations. Provide any open source documentation on API’s too, that always helps in terms of gathering realistic numbers and not inflated ones because the agency just doesn’t know enough. This will also narrow the field of agencies really quickly for you and make sure you get a better steer on solutions because not all team can or want to work on all platforms and integrations.
Spoiler alert – agencies know you bend the truth when it comes to budgets. It’s a lot easier if both sides are open and honest so both teams are on one page straight away. This will save time and also build trust right out of the gate whilst also making sure that the agencies responding to your brief are being as realistic as possible about the ability to deliver within your budget and time.
We don’t need more carbon heavy, clunky and chunky websites on the internet. Adding “please detail how you will make our site low carbon and accessible please” into your brief will sort those who can from those who can’t and will result in you being delivered a new, sustainable, low carbon site that will look after you well into the future. You shouldn’t have to compromise on performance or impact so this one should be your default.
It’s as easy as that! Happy brief writing!
