Design Brief | ©Mr Daniel M. Fisher | How to get the Best from Your Market Research.

How to get the best from YOU.

While I would never discourage you from shooting for the stars with a design brief, your starting point is fundamental, particularly when it comes to how you state your goals to achieve, and the order of priority for these goals. Improving upon your current site is a place to start, but here are suggestions for common goals:

A long-term vision can really inspire and motivate your public by helping them to see what truly matters to you. What do you love most about your organisation and its history? Are there any core values that you might not talk about outside meetings but that still guide your decisions, these are all helpful to share in your brief.

And importantly, how do your customers, clients, or service users currently see you? How would you like them to see you in the future? Does their belief of you match reality; would you like that to change? So, talk about what you offer to your customers or service users and what makes you special within the industry, and present the unique selling points of your service or product offering.

Tell people how your audience uses your current website and how you would like them to use your new website. Will they need to make purchases or bookings, get a quote, find information, or access content?

The Working Intellectuals choice of light hearted photography content for people to enjoy on a website.

Talk about any organisations that are particularly similar or comparable to yours in terms of service offering, and say which organisations people associate you with or compare you to, and ask, how are you different from each other? Are these organisations local to you or do they work on a regional, national, or international scale?

It’s beneficial to look at the digital presence of similar organisations to see what they are doing successfully and ask, what are your competitors doing better than you? What are you doing better than them? You should conduct your own competitor research during the planning phase of the website project and then plan a strategy that allows you to stand out from, or compete against, similar organisations.

Not all web developers will provide the same services or have the same areas of expertise. By laying out all the things you need from the very beginning, you avoid obstacles along the way. Do you need someone to design your website or build your website, or both? Because a business will have in-house teams of designers or developers and are looking for support. You might need a design for your team to build or a web developer to build from your design, or you might need to be both.

Does your new site need fresh branding? This could include a new logo, colour scheme, font, or name. You may already have an established set of digital brand guidelines you would like to work with or need new and updated guidelines to reflect new branding or accessibility considerations. Use this opportunity to refresh the content on your website, such as copywriting and images. You might do this yourself, but you should include it in your brief to see what support is on offer.

Ask Someone about website branding design ideas.

Are you interested in ongoing digital marketing support post-launch? This might include social media management, SEO blogs, paid advertising, campaigns, monthly analysis and reporting to name opportunities for you. All these could help you get the most from your new site, like having high quality images of your products, services, team, and premises that are usable and up to date as, many agencies provide support for photography, copywriting, and more.

Are you looking for a website that allows users to complete online purchases directly from that site? This will require integrated ecommerce software, something not all people are able to provide.

Do you have a dependable web server already or are you looking for an agency to host your new website? This will require server hosting capacity, which is something not all people are able to provide.

Be as detailed and as you can with your goals, preferably with clear quantitative or qualitative goalposts e.g. increase event bookings – by how much? Enhance website accessibility – to what standard? And again, be realistic, because a new website is an investment that will take time to pay off in results. You won’t automatically start ranking at the top of Google overnight, for example, as this is one area of the brief that can and will develop as the project progresses. If you are clear in what you want to see, you will know what success looks like.

You might not know exactly why you need a new site; you might have just received negative feedback about it. If that is the case, then more detailed information is useful, this is where agencies start to set themselves apart, by naming problems for you and offering tailored solutions.

Define the amount and scope of pages you have on your existing site and list the pages you want to see on your new website. You do not have to name every product or service offered but give a good overview of the key areas of your site e.g. If you have a specific sitemap or structure in mind for your website, share this in your website project brief. How are the pages to be grouped together? What new areas do you plan to incorporate into your site? Will your new site follow a similar structure to your existing site, or does it need rethinking and restructuring i.e. What key areas of your current site are overlooked, and what sort of user journey would you like to ease?

There is no time like the present.

Don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how things should be structured, as you will look at your website goals and use these to create a sitemap that will help achieve a funnel for you. If you have research data, including keyword research or performance statistics, these will be incredibly beneficial to building your new website, as they help create an informed project strategy.

You can talk about the different types of content or features on your current site, aside from your products or services, as the type of content and features installed will directly impact the size and speed of your site, so this can affect the timescale and cost of the project, hence you will need to account for this in a quote and approach.

How will content be copied and migrated across from your current site, or will there be anything new to the brand? Are there any notable features you have on your current site or ones you would like building for your new website? All this can affect the timescale and cost of the project.

Mention the platform or content management system that you use to manage your current website, because you can say what you like or do not like about this system, as you may want to change systems, because many developers will specialise in specific platforms or website hosting to ensure they can offer a bespoke solution.

If you have any needs or expectations for your future content management system or hosting requirements, this is your opportunity to talk about it in clear detail and include any other software you use and would like the new website to work alongside e.g. Do you use any external donation platforms, content libraries, learning software, mailing or other customer relations management tools like room appointment booking software?

Follow your heart and make the decision to chase that leap of faith.

Any successful website design project will start with a good, hard look at the website you currently have and in general ask, how is your current website falling short? What has motivated you to seek a new website now? Does it rank poorly on Google or receive low traffic? Has the site failed to convert traffic into goal completions? Does the website load slowly? Is it difficult to use on mobile? Is it outdated, missing current info or fresh branding? Or are there any features of your current site that you would like to keep, such as how it looks or how it functions?

It is important to talk about all the things you see as strengths in your current website, as you can aim to keep the things you like but also find if these features will affect your overall aims. An example would be a particular colour scheme that you like but does not pass web accessibility standards due to colour blindness.

If your website users have reported any specific problems they have while browsing your current site or the people who manage the content have any notable grievances updating the CMS, include these things in your brief. Highlighting any issues you have had with your current website will help prevent them occurring on your new site.

Name any website features that you would like reflected in your new site e.g. Which websites do you find enjoyable and easy to use? Which website designs do you think look fantastic? What features of these sites are particularly notable for you? Or are there any websites you do not enjoy, and why?

This is not an essential part of the brief, and your examples do not need to be from your arts and culture niche – they just need to speak to you, so try including any links or screenshots of these features so you can easily find what you’re talking about. No one wants to directly copy another web design, but they will be able to take inspiration from any website features that you have shown and reinterpret them through the lens of their unique brand identity, and the more detailed or specific you can be about what you like, the easier they will find it to translate across.

It's easier than you think it is.

But if you compare the designs presented to a secret standard of other websites that you did not tell anyone about, your public will be left with the painstaking process of trying to read your mind, so clearly show any fixed or flexible choices for the web project in your brief, with as much detail as possible. Do you need the project quote by a particular date? Do you need your website launch to coincide with a particular event or involve any other organisations or stakeholders?

You will want to meet your own expectations and launch your website on time, but you need to be realistic, because bespoke websites take time to build and if you want your new site to meet best practices for design, accessibility, integrations, SEO, and security, you will need to understand the timescale of such a project and plan accordingly. As it is likely that your project will take time to build, with larger projects taking the best part of a year, and if you are too tight with your deadlines, you may struggle to find the time to meet all your needs. You can rest assured that anyone promising to complete a project in couple of weeks is probably giving you an out-of-the-box template.

Set out the budget you have for your website project and whether this is an estimate or an absolute limit, and if you have a fixed figure, does that figure include VAT? Does the budget include initial hosting costs or is this separate? If you have a rough estimate, would you then like to view a range of pricing options to choose from?

The deciding factor in choosing a website can often come down to cost, and it is important to be honest and specific about your planned budget so anyone pitching can tell you exactly what you can get for your money. If you keep it vague, you might not get the correct picture, because everyone has their own hourly and daily rates as well as their own pricing systems for web projects.

You will thank Yourself at the end of the day.

I mentioned earlier that most quotes include the projects overall time it will take to develop, as bespoke web projects do take time and therefore money to build, because years ago people were promising new sites for pin money, and while you might still find the occasional agency that does this, you will not be getting something as effective.

©Mr Daniel M. Fisher, of ®All Seasons Art Studio, 2025

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