When approaching a designer/developer/beekeeper (I’ll stick to “designer” in the post, for simplicity) with your website project, it’s no good just asking “how much does a website cost?”. We often only have ourselves to blame for not providing enough information about how to approach us, so in this post I’d like to share some important points to think about, and a downloadable questionnaire you can use to create useful creative briefs in future.

What do you already have, and what do you need

This is probably the biggest surprise omission from my point of view. Often people will contact me to ask for a quote for, say, a WordPress theme. After some investigation it turns out they also need hosting, WordPress installing on their server, content migration from their old site,  a new logo and 3 hours of training on how to admin their new site. That does not all come under “WordPress theme”.

If in doubt, be overly detailed rather than leaving possibly important information out.

Goals for the project

Are you trying to increase awareness  of your brand? Do you want to get more website visitors to buy a product from your online store? Are you working on improving search engine rankings? Do you need to just generate more traffic and pageviews for advertising purposes? Are you trying to take over the world and make “the next Facebook”?

However far-fetched your ideas, make sure your designer knows about them. This will help them decide whether your project falls into their area of expertise, if your budget is too low, and probably start some ideas going round in their head before they’ve even been awarded the project. Protip: If you’re trying to make “the next Facebook”, don’t.

Design stuff

Link to other websites you like, and ones you don’t, and give reasons for each. Where posible these should be in a similar niche to yours, but even a general guide to your tastes is immensely helpful.

If you already have a logo/brand with specific colours, mention them here. If not, feel free to give your opinions on which colours and styles you’d like to see. A good designer will always listen to what you want, but bear in mind that a good client will respect their designer’s expertise when advice is offered.

Site structure

You should always know, if only vaguely, what will be included in your site before trying to get a quote. You can use Excel, an online mind mapping tool, or even just a list of page titles to represent the structure, but it gives your designer a good idea of the size and complexity of the site. If you already have a design and you’re looking for someone to develop the site, it may seem obvious to you what the structure should be just from looking at the existing images. Please trust me when I say it’s better to jot down a site structure anyway than to leave someone to fill in any gaps with their imagination.

You don’t need to be really specific about which page will go under which in a dropdown menu, just make sure you have all of the important content included in the plan. Part of a designer’s job is to fit everything into a usable site layout.

Features

You may have a detailed feature list drawn up already, but be unwilling to share it with just anyone. On the other hand, you may not have thought about it much beyond “I want a community site”. Write down a list of at least the most important features in your brief, and if this first stage goes well you can always get more detailed down the line as your designer should tell you exactly what they’ll need to know.

“But I just want a design, not the development!” – Hand over a feature list anyway, a designer needs to know that you plan on having an event calendar so they can actually design it. Mocking up a homepage and leaving the rest up to the imagination of whichever poor coder you hire later is baaaad.

Budget and timescale

This is a bit controversial, since a lot of people think giving away your budget means a provider will always come in as high as they can. This may be true of some unscrupulous characters but try not to judge the industry as a whole.

Giving your ballpark budget helps the designer, since they won’t be wasting time quoting on a project that pays too little or too much (yes there’s such a thing as too much!), and it helps you because the designer can advise you on the best way to proceed, you’re not spending time reading quotes that are way beyond your means, and as an added bonus you get to see how the designer handles the situation which is a good indicator of their professionalism.

For example you want X, Y and Z completed in 2 weeks for $500 but this budget is too low, a bad designer will tell you so and you’ll be on your way to someone else. A good designer will work around what you have available and offer to remove unnecessary feature Y with the possibility of revisiting it later, or increase the timescale to make the project more financially viable. You’d always have the option of just going to someone cheaper, but as we all know “you get what you pay for”.

Example website brief

This downloadable example can be edited in Word etc and used as-is, or can just be a starting point for your own brief. I hope it can be of use, if so please leave a lovely comment to brighten my day.