With January on the horizon, we thought it would be a great idea to give you some tips on how to write a good website brief.

What are the primary things to cover in your website brief?

Have you already bought your domain and email addresses, or will these need to be bought and budgeted for too?

We’d recommend buying these yourself so that you own the rights to them and have control over when you’ll renew them yourself.

Will your site require eCommerce to power a shop and receive payments, or is it a general website where no checkout/cart and payment gateway is required?

Would you prefer a placement holding (single-page) site, or a comprehensive SEO-driven website?

A generic site will have less text so may well have cleaner visual appeal, whereas an SEO-driven site will ideally have one page per product/service, with 500-600 words per page which include your keywords.

This will drive more visitors to your site but will likely require well-structured subheadings and works best with a blog too.

Once Google has indexed your site with your SEO keywords, bringing leads to your website, if you’re expecting it to have ongoing SEO work behind the scenes as well, you could ask for a price for this separately.

Have a serious think about your budget and outline this so that you can give an accurate idea of how much you’ll be willing to spend. This will give an idea of the scale of the project.

Knowing the answers to these questions will ensure that you’re well on the way to being able to write a good website brief.

Give some background to set the scene

If you want to write a good website brief, you’ll need to give some background on yourself and your company.

Here are some useful questions you’ll want to answer:

• Who are you, and what does your business do?
• What’s your target audience?
• How big is your team?
• What are your values and ethics?
• Do you have any certifications?
• What are your CTAs (calls to action) – how do you want people to get in touch from the website? This might be different on every page – actions such as contact us, download further info, book a demo, book a call back…
• If you’re self-employed ‘one-man band’, do you want to appear as a bigger outfit, e.g. having a landline rather than a mobile number, and not adding a ‘team’ page, hiding your map if you work from home etc.?
• Do you have a brand guideline, or fixed colour palette for the web team to follow?

How would you like your website to be structured?

A big part of knowing how to write a good website brief is knowing what you want.

Have a look at other websites, not just those of your competitors!

Send over a selection of URLs with your list of likes and dislikes for each, to give the agency a feel for exactly what you’re looking for.

It doesn’t matter how many links you give; it might be you like the navigation of one, the layout of another, the colour scheme, the footer, a gallery layout, even a product page of another - all of this detail will help.

Think about the flow of your website - will it be a single page (which we don’t recommend for SEO), or will it guide users through from one page to another?

If you require an SEO-driven site, you’ll need a site plan for every product or service, as each will have its own page.

You could also provide a list of the names of the pages you’d like to be created.

Design, look and feel

You’ll also need to outline the intended design of your website to write a good website brief.

Will you provide your own images? Bespoke photography is best, as it’s hard to trust a website that relies too heavily on stock photos.

Do you have a brand guideline?

This is more than just a logo, but a style of imagery, brand colour palette, fonts, tone of voice etc, that will need to be considered throughout the site. If you have a brand guideline, you can provide this upfront.

When it comes to fonts, you may not be able to use a specific one, but Google often has fonts very similar which can duplicate your branding. Whichever agency you use will be able to advise on this.

What about added extras that make a big difference to the look and feel of your site once you’ve launched?

One example is having your social media headers to match your website style; this can be easily created and included in the price. So why not mention this in the brief and tell them the platforms you are on?

Be prepared to provide a lot of content

A website as a whole needs lots of EEAT signals (which stands for Experience, Expertise and Authoritativeness Trust signals) which you will need to provide.

Your ‘about us’ page needs to fully showcase your EEATs to give a feel for you and your brand.

You’ll need to demonstrate experience, expertise, authority and trust, so make sure that you evidence these in your brief.

A great way of demonstrating expertise in your brief is by including reviews. Start collating them especially if they’re spread across multiple platforms like Facebook, Google, TrustPilot, Feefo,  and LinkedIn etc. Maybe copy and paste them all into one Google doc and if you'd like your reviews showing on each of your services pages, be sure to flag which reviews relate to which service.

If you’d like your new website to show these in real time, you’ll need to add this into your brief as it’ll require a plug-in (from the review platform to your website back-end) which will need to be priced for.

You’ll want to clarify that you don’t want any duplicate or AI-written content, and that if you require a SEO-driven site, you need SEO-optimised text written for each page.

Technical things we recommend you ask for

If it’s not a world you’re acquainted with, it can be hard to know what you need.

We’d recommend that the agencies you approach include in their quote:

• Setting up and providing access to Google analytics (GA4)
• Setting up and populating Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business)
• Reducing pop ups and overwhelming ads
• Providing any plugins you need, for reviews, social media, etc.
• Linking to social media – outline which you use
• Creation of a blog – these are great for long-form SEO content
• Including some back-linking work post-launch 
• Adding a Facebook pixel to your website – this can start collecting valuable data for if and when you want to start retargeting website visitors, or when you want a warm audience to advertise to.

You may be worried about asking for everything upfront in case this drives up the price.

These are all the things you need to consider, so you will have to pay for them at some point, and you may as well know what figure you’re looking for from the start. 

It’s worth considering appointing someone in-house who can project manage the work required for collating all your resources and writing your brief itself, as this is a big task and it’s so important to write a good website brief.

How can we help you to write a good website brief?

At The Thinking Cap we love to partner with SMEs to help them to grow and achieve their goals.

We design, project-manage, write SEO copy and handhold throughout the entire project, the only thing we outsource is the back-end techy development and hosting, (which we also manage with our trusted partners).

We know all the jargon, we know what you need, and we’ll smoothly provide everything required, eliminating delays which can hold some sites up for months.

Alternatively, if you have an agency in mind, we can help you write your website brief, provide the designs, copy and be the go-between, keeping you up to speed at all times.

We’d love to hear from you if you’d like to work together on your website or on a website brief. Book an initial 15-minute chat to talk it all through, or simply get in touch for a price.

We also offer an ‘ideas hour’ where we could chat for longer and thrash everything out to help you to collate your brief.

Whatever you need, we’d love to help you to launch a fresh website in the new year, get in touch today about how to write a good website brief.