A few ideas on writing a website brief which a design company can quote on

First, you need to write a brief to get a reliable quote

I’ll often get calls from small businesses and sole traders looking for quotes for a website. While they’ll have a good idea of what they want, to provide a solid price and timescale, the devil is always in the detail. That’s why I’ll always ask for a brief. However, often the response I’ll get is, “We don’t have one” or “We don’t know where to start in writing one” – so if that sounds like you, maybe this post will be of some use.

Focus on your objectives

A good web design company will just want to know about your business objectives. From this, they can recommend solutions.

As an example, our briefing form, which is based on one used by Clearleft, with a few other objective based questions thrown in, is all about trying to find out about your requirements, as well as who your audience and customers are, who you compete with and what kind of image you want to create online.

Tell us about your business in your own words

Beyond the actual brief, we’re also aiming here for you to tell us all about your business. You know your company best, so that should be an easy thing to do shouldn’t it? Aim to talk to us in your language, not ours, and let us come back to you for points of clarity if we don’t understand some of your objectives.

And really, that’s it…

Is it?

Yes, pretty much.

However… listing your objectives alone won’t get your website built. There may be other important stages that need to be covered too – such as user research for example. In any case, your site will only get built once you’ve agreed that the solutions proposed back to you in the web company’s response make sense and deliver on your objectives.

Does the web design company’s response deliver on your objectives?

This can be a difficult thing to ascertain, because it may not be obvious to you initially, as the client, how the solution that’s been proposed delivers on your business needs. But the extent to how well your prospective development partner assists you with that stage will be one of the key criteria you use in trusting whether or not they are the company to work with. Then, beyond that, even with the solutions agreed, depending on the scope of the site, more detailed work may need to be done on specifying exactly how your site is built.

So the brief is just the first stage then?

Yes, it is. And its worth is weight in gold.

A brief will enable you to compare different providers

A good brief is a uniform document you can take to a number of potential providers, meaning the proposals you get back will be something you can compare like for like.

Many companies will give you that initial response for free. However, if more detailed planning needs to be done to specify exactly what the solution might look like, then it may be that this in itself becomes a chargeable stage of the project. It really depends on the size of the project overall, but a good prospective provider will always let you know to what extent the planning you’ve done in the brief gives them the info they need.

By Alick Mighall, MD, http://miggle.co.uk