BT Tower - Project management helps you to reach the sky (Photo by M Steer. All rights reserved)
This post is the second part of my 5 stages of project management series and covers the most important aspect of the first stage; writing a brief for a web design project. To follow the whole series, you can click on the link above to take you to the first part. You can download Redcentaur’s brief template, which helps to define the start of the process, at the end of this post.
Why is this important?
Web design projects are only ever successful if two things can be achieved at the same time:
- You provide your client with a site that fulfills the brief and they are satisfied with it; and
- You have correctly estimated the time it will take to complete the project and you have been adequately paid for the work you have done.
To achieve both of these, it is essential for you to have a clear understanding of what your client wants to achieve. One of the ways I do this is to set out exactly what the client wants to achieve from their web site and the reasons for it in a Creative Brief. The questions that help to define this brief are detailed below and at the end of this post, you can download the template we use to help us with this.
Obviously, the completion of a creative brief is not the be-all-and-end-all of understanding your client. It is the starting point. From this, there needs to be further discussion to drill down into the responses to the brief.
The brief
In Vandelay Design‘s article, 9 things to understand about a client when starting a design project, there were three additional points that were identified that I have not included in my own brief. These are: the corporate culture, the client’s reason for choosing you as a designer and their plans for maintaining the site. I agree with Vandelay Design that these are important factors and I will leave it to you to decide whether they are worth adding to your own brief. Vandelay Design has given a great view of the reasoning for obtaining this information up front:
An effective website will be built to address the specific needs of the business, which will require the designer to accurately understand a lot of details about the business. - Vandelay Design
For Redcentaur, there are two parts to a creative brief that are designed to give the web developer a clear understanding of the client, their needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses.
Paying heed and due attention to the brief can pay dividends for both client and designer in reducing the risk of missing the mark at a later stage.
The creative brief
The key part of the brief is the creative expectation of the client. This can be broken down into four sections. Remember, your client might not have a clear grasp of these expectations themselves. This section of the brief should help them to start pinning down some of these concepts if they haven’t already and teasing out exactly what it is you need to know.
Remember, your client might not have a clear grasp of these expectations themselves.
Summary
This section should give a general overview of the client (and the project as they envisage it). It should state the purpose of the project from their perspective and identify any specific goals they have in mind.
Audience profile
Your client probably has a general idea of who the target audience is for their web site and this section provides you with an opportunity to identify the target market from the outset. By asking your client what they think the target audience is, what they care about and why they would visit the site, you are able to develop an in-depth understanding of your client’s aspirations and the factors that will measure the success of your design. Another aspect of this might be covered by the question “what would convert the target into customers?”
Communication
In my experience, this is one of the most difficult factors to obtain from a client. Often clients do not have a clear idea of their message or how that message should be conveyed. Usually, this is because they have an inherent idea that they have not yet articulated. This section is about what it is your client wants to say to their target audience and why it is important for that audience to have this message.
Competitive position
In an age when the internet has brought huge amounts of information to every audience, competitive edge is king. You need to be clear on the things that set your client apart from the crowd and what factors make your client a success where others in their field are not. This will give you the key strengths of your client that will need to be capitalised upon in the design. It will also help to ensure that you do not design a site that is wide of the image that your client wants to portray.
The technical brief
The client may have an idea of the technical aspects of the site that need to be delivered. These can be as fundamental as site logos and photography, copy, contact forms, etc. or more technical issues, such as database integration and scripts. The technical brief should be tailored to the services that you are able to provide. This is a secondary part to the brief as much of the technical specification will be a result of the design as it develops, but it is important here to understand if the client has decided the site will form the backbone of its customer relationship management, for example.
The technical brief should be tailored to the services that you are able to provide.
Roles and responsibilities
Once you have some answers to these questions, you can start to flesh out what are the roles and responsibilities within the project – who will provide the site images or the copy…? You will make a number of assumptions in defining the brief and costing the project that you will need to make explicit to the client in the form of expected roles and responsibilities.
You need to be clear about this so you can accurately estimate the time required – if you suddenly find that the client does not have suitable photography, you will need to source them at additional cost.
Download
You can download the Redcentaur creative brief in pdf format to understand what we ask our clients in building the inception stage of a project.
Whatever next?
Once you have completed this stage, you will have a clearer understanding of your clients’ specification and you will be ready to start sketching a few quick designs. You can find out what to look out for during the Design stage by reading The Web Design Process.
Discussion
Please leave a comment below to let us know how useful this is to you. Are there other aspects that you feel have not been tackled in our brief? Is this something you don’t find useful? How do you understand your client’s expectations?
