10 Key Ingredients for a Good Web Design Brief

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A web design brief is a single document that outlines your website project and is given to a web design provider for evaluation. Once a good quality brief is written, a web design provider will submit either a quote or a detailed proposal which explains how the goals of your brief can be achieved.

A design brief doesn’t need to be complicated.

However…

The more detailed your brief, the more accurate the quoted price is going to be.

This lesson teaches you the 10 key ingredients for a good brief. After you have read the lesson, download the free Web Design Brief Template so you can easily submit your brief to designers when you request quotes.

Web Design Brief Ingredients

If you’ve read the previous lessons in this 6-part “Web Design Buyer’s Guide” you will already have seven of the ten requirements for a design brief (well done!):

1. Purpose
2. Technology
3. Sitemap
4. Target audience
5. Goals
6. Content and products
7. Required technical features
8. Design style
9. Examples of style
10. Budget

8. Describing the Design Style of a Website

This can be a little tricky if you are not overly creative. But don’t worry, there are some pretty standard ways of describing style that will make sense for your web design provider. Answer these three questions and you will have enough information to define the style.

What is the primary colour for the website’s interface?

Blue, Green, Orange… You get the picture.

What is the projected image and attitude of the business?

Professional, sophisticated, young, friendly, techie.

What is the main type of content on the website?

Images, videos, text.

9. Finding Examples of Web Design Styles

When it comes to finding websites that have a similar style to what you have in mind, there are two very simple methods.

1. Search for your Competitors’ Websites

Write a list your competitors’ websites and explain what you like and don’t like.

2. Browse Through a Web Design Gallery

Take a look at Dribble and find examples the match your desired style. Dribble has a great feature that allows you to browse by colour.

Again, write a list of the designs you like and write down what you like and don’t like.

10. How Budgeting for Web Design Works

Budgets for web design are rarely straightforward. It all depends on the features, design and content. The bulk of your budget will go toward:

• implementing technical features
• customising the design and interface and
• integrating the website with 3rd party software (social networks, accounting software, CRMs etc)

All of the above tasks take time, and of course the more time spent, the more it will cost.

But don’t worry, there are many clever web design studios out there that know how to make amazing websites at very affordable rates.

Generally the best approach is to decide from the start your maximum budget, create the web design brief and request quotes. The web designers will tell you what can be achieved for what you have. If you’re budget can’t support what you want, then the web designer will make suggestions on how to reduce the price.

For example, you can opt to have less interface design revisions (this is where you critique their design) which means less time spent on design.

If you want to get a rough idea of how much websites costs you can use our free online web design price calculator.

Now that you have every ingredient for a web design brief, put it all in one document so it is ready to send out to web designers for quotes.

Download our Web Design Brief Template

You can download our free Web Design Brief Template modelled on each of the lessons in this 6-part Web Design Buyer’s Guide series.

• Brief template is modelled on the Web Design Buyer’s Guide
• Includes the fields required by web designers
• Can be printed for easy hand over

Don’t want a free subscription to our blog? No worries, you can unlock download button by simply sharing this post.

Go back to the Web Design Buyer’s Guide series

Compare Web Design Quotes from Local Designers.

About Daniel Duckworth

Daniel is a co-founder of Design Quotes and specialises in digital marketing. Daniel consults on search engine optimsation, internet marketing, web design and graphic design.

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