Four Steps to a Solid Web Design Brief; What does your client want?
By: Sasch Mayer

This is conceivably one of the biggest problems facing commercial web design companies dealing with small and medium businesses. The fact is that the majority of clients are not what you may call technically minded and are consequently ill-equipped to provide you with a proper brief for the job in hand.

Without a proper brief however, you are likely to be left flying blind where your client's requirements are concerned, which in turn will greatly reduce the efficiency and profitability of your service.

What do you do if a client approaches you with only half an idea of what they actually want?

Take the lead
As a web design professional, you will doubtlessly have encountered all types of clients and job specifications, so you should be able to determine what a client actually needs from a short consultation about their site.

Although there is no set recipe for the 'perfect web design brief', here are four points which ease your task of nailing down your client's requirements.

1. The Objective - What is the purpose of the site?

• Will the site sell a particular product or service?
• Is it an information site?
• Does it provide news about a particular industry or market sector?
• Is it a special interest site (hobby, fan site, collectibles, etc.)?
• Is it designed to entertain whilst selling something or merely to entertain and rely on revenue from such channels as Adsense and Commission Junction?
• Does it serve to promote businesses in the 'real world'?

Establishing a site's prime function goes a long way towards providing a viable solution for your client.

2. The Target Audience and their Computers

• Your client is most likely to have a very concrete notion about the target audience in his or her market sector. Once you have this information, you need to create a user profile and work out what type of computer/browser/screen resolution they are likely to use.
• Don't necessarily work to the lowest common denominator. If you design for screen resolutions of 640x480 and a depth of only 256 colors, the user experience of those visitors actually able to afford whatever it is the web site is selling or promoting will suffer greatly and your client will lose sales.

3. Scope of Requirements - What is the project's technical depth?

• As a web design professional, you need to know what technologies you are likely to need in order to successfully deploy the site in question.
• Will it be straight HTML or will there be a need for Flash, SQL databases, ASP, a shopping cart, online credit card clearance facilities, etc.?
• Basic page layout can be anything but basic.
• Try to establish what is likely to be required before launching into the creation of a master template for the new site.
• Don't leave any room for 'Feature Creep'.

4. The Budget - Is your client realistic about the project's cost?

All too often your client has a 'friend of a friend' who does a bit of web design on the side.
In most cases, this 'friend' has a little experience with Dreamweaver™ or FrontPage™ and now considers him or herself to be a fully fledged web designer.

Without any clear idea of what is actually involved in the project, they have provided a ridiculously low quote for the job and your client now expects you to match this.

It now becomes your task to convince your client that your services, whilst substantially more expensive, are in fact far superior whilst at the same time doing your best not to insult the abilities of the aforementioned 'friend'.

Ultimately, the watchword is 'credibility'. As a web design professional, your level of knowledge is most likely far in advance of your part-time competitor and you need to convince your client that they can either entrust the job to someone who is a welder by day and web designer by night or to an experienced professional able to meet any requirement in an efficient and professional manner.

Conclusion

Although the above may seem like a momentous task on the face of it, it will nevertheless make your life easier in the long run.

Many clients will come to you with new ideas and requirements as the project progresses, but will be unwilling to pay extra for these new add-ons which were not part of the initial spec. The trick is to anticipate as many optional requirements as possible and account for these in your web design brief.