The projects that run smoothly, launch on time and stay on budget almost always have one thing in common: the client did a bit of preparation before the first meeting. It doesn’t take long, and it saves weeks later on.
Here’s what to gather before you brief a web designer, and why each part matters.
Know what the site is for
Before anything else, write down the one or two things you most want visitors to do. Call you? Book an appointment? Buy something? Ask for a quote? Sign up for a newsletter?
It sounds obvious, but it’s the most important part of the brief. Every design decision follows from it: what goes at the top of the homepage, what the buttons say, which pages exist and how they link together. A site that tries to do everything equally usually does nothing particularly well.
It also helps to know how you’ll measure success. More enquiries? More online sales? Fewer phone calls asking the same questions? A clear goal makes it much easier to judge whether the new site is working.
Describe your customers
Who are you trying to reach? A short description of your main types of customer is enough:
- Who they are, for example homeowners, small businesses or other trades
- What they need from you and what problem they’re trying to solve
- What worries them before they buy, such as price, reliability or timing
- How they usually find you now
A designer who understands your customers can write and design for them, rather than for you. Those are often quite different things.
List the pages you need
You don’t need a finished site map, but a rough list of pages helps a designer estimate the work accurately. A typical small business site might include:
- Home
- A page for each main service or product range
- About, including your team
- Examples of your work or case studies
- Reviews or testimonials
- Contact
- News or articles, if you’ll keep them up to date
If you have an existing site, look at your analytics, if you have them, to see which pages people actually visit. Those are the ones to keep and improve.
Gather your content
Missing content is the single most common reason website projects run late. Designers can build pages quickly, but they can’t invent your service descriptions, prices or team biographies.
Start collecting:
- Your logo in the highest quality you have, ideally as a vector file (SVG, EPS or PDF)
- Brand colours and fonts, if you have guidelines
- Photos of your team, premises and work. Real photos almost always beat stock images.
- Service descriptions: what you offer, who it’s for and what’s included
- Testimonials and reviews, with permission to use them
- Examples of past work, with before and after photos where relevant
- Accreditations, memberships and awards
If writing isn’t your strength, say so early. Many designers, us included, can help with copywriting, but it needs to be included in the plan and the quote.
Collect examples you like
Find two or three websites you like, and two or three you don’t. They don’t need to be in your industry. For each one, note what you like or dislike about it: the layout, the colours, the photography, how easy it is to use, the tone of the writing.
“I like this” is useful. “I like how this site shows prices clearly and makes booking easy” is much more useful. It gives the designer a clear sense of your taste and priorities without you needing to describe a design in words.
Think about features
Make a list of anything the site needs to do beyond showing information:
- Online booking or appointment scheduling
- Selling products or taking payments
- Quote or enquiry forms with specific questions
- A members’ area or client portal
- Connections to your other systems, such as your CRM, accounting or email marketing
- Multiple languages
Features have the biggest effect on cost and timescale, so the earlier they’re known, the more accurate your quote will be.
Be open about budget and timing
It can feel safer to keep your budget to yourself, but sharing a range helps everyone. It lets a designer recommend what will make the most difference for the money, rather than guessing. A good designer will tell you honestly if your goals and budget don’t match, and suggest how to phase the work.
The same goes for deadlines. If you need the site live for a launch, a trade show or a busy season, say so at the start.
Have your logins ready
Nothing delays a launch like a forgotten password. Before the project starts, find the logins for:
- Your domain name registrar, where your web address is registered
- Your DNS settings, often with the registrar or your current host
- Your current website hosting
- Your email provider, as changes to your domain can affect email if they’re not handled carefully
- Google Business Profile, Google Analytics and Search Console
- Social media accounts you want linked from the site
If you don’t know who controls your domain name, now is the time to find out. Make sure it’s registered to your business, not to a former employee or a previous web designer.
Don’t forget your existing site
If you’re replacing a website, your current pages may already rank on Google and have links from other sites. When the new site launches with different web addresses, those old links can break and your rankings can drop.
Ask your designer how they’ll handle this. The answer should involve redirecting old page addresses to their new equivalents, so visitors and Google are sent to the right place. It’s a small job that protects years of work.
Decide who makes decisions
Finally, agree who will give feedback and sign off the work. Projects slow down when feedback comes from several people with different opinions, or when the person with the final say only sees the site at the end. One main contact, with clear authority, keeps things moving.
Ready to start?
You don’t need everything above to be perfect before you get in touch. Even a rough version of each section makes the first conversation far more productive. If you’d like to talk about a new website, take a look at our website design and development service and our case studies, or get in touch with what you have so far.
