Why Most Website Briefs Miss the Mark (And How to Fix Yours)

You may already have a website which needs a refresh, or you might be commissioning your first ever site. In either case you're going to need to have a brief for when you speak to the website designer.

Not quite sure what should be in the brief? It’s easy to focus on what the design might look like, or having just enough pages, but not too many. You want something that is a great representation of you, but you don’t want it to come across as you showing off, either.

I can assure you, it’s not showing off. And the better representation of you your website is, the more likely it is to bring in leads and make sales. But that’s only part of the process.

Here’s everything you need to know, so you can work on a great website brief with your website designer.

The days of thinking of a website just being a shopfront are long gone. Your website’s job is to bring in leads, convert visitors to customers and make sales. Whether that’s directly on the site using a payment button, or through the enquiry form, which then takes the visitor on a buying journey.

When thinking what you’d like your website to do, have some (realistic) goals in mind. By realistic, I mean - if your company’s turning over £40k per year, setting a goal of £100k via website sales would be setting you up for disappointment.

When planning a new website the goals I like it to hit are:

I use images of the awards I’ve won, my blog and resource pages, client testimonials and my portfolio to show people that I know what I’m doing, have successful results and many happy clients.

You’ll see the ‘book a call’ button frequently on the website. That’s because part of my sales process is to meet people on Zoom. Potential customers can talk to me in detail about what they want from their website, I can explain the process and I can also share my screen showing them different websites I’ve built, ideas I have, and even contracts/agreements.

Having book a call links on the website saves people from having to email me or go back and forth on the contact form. The less steps it takes for someone to get in touch, the more likely they are to do so.

There are thousands of website designers available, why would someone choose me? Because I give them all the information they need, in one place. No having to jump to my LinkedIn profile, or scroll posts to see where I’ve shared portfolio examples, testimonials, awards etc. Just one place where the words are written by me, some of them are about me, and they give the opportunity for you to get to know me without your experience being jumbled up by people commenting or the noise of the Social Media scroll.

The ultimate goal of a website is to increase sales and in service led industries this means them getting in touch. I’ve already spoken about booking a call, I also make it easy for people to contact me in the way that works best for them. This could be using a contact form, or emailing. They may like to look me up on Social Media - it’s all there, on the contact page, which is available both, on the menu and through linked text and buttons on the website, for them to do this.

Many website owners will say “I don’t want to exclude anyone” and this is where they go wrong. Have you heard the expression ‘try to appeal to everyone and you’ll appeal to no-one’? That. Every time.

You want to appeal to the people you want to work with and, more importantly, you want to repel the people you don’t want to work with. It’s ok for people to not like you/your website/what you’re selling, if you don’t want them to be your customers.

Know who your target audience is. In most cases your website designer will have some experience of your industry/services etc and how to reflect this in the website design.

I’m a fan of staying in your lane and not worrying too much about what your competitors are doing. It’s too easy to be distracted by or feel less than your competitors if you’re constantly monitoring what they’re up to.

However, having an idea of who your competitors are can help your website designer get a feel for the website design. This doesn’t mean copying them, but having an awareness of ones whose websites you like/what you like about them, can help. Send your website designer up to 3 links of competitors’ websites, with what you do/don’t like about the sites. Just don’t ask a website designer to recreate a website design verbatim. It’s immoral and won’t work in your favour.

When a website designer talks about a multi-page website, it’s not that they’re trying to upsell to you, it’s because they know that Google won’t be able to search for multiple key phrases when on just one page and multiple page websites have a higher conversion rate than one pagers.

This is the fun part - where we get to take all the strategy, the copy, the brand, thoughts, conversations and turn it into a website that you, and your customers, love.

Website Designers, Brand Designers and Graphic Designers all have different skillsets. Some of them will cross over; for example, where Website Designers also offer Brand design. Or Graphic Designers working across branding. However, branding designers are not website designers and, unless your website designer states otherwise, please don’t ask them to create your brand for you.

The short version of the reasoning behind this is:

Website Design - responsive design - specialising in design adapting to different screen sizes and shapes, colours and resolutions are paid particular attention to as these differ from print design.

Brand Design - non-responsive design - create a brand identity for a company or person which encompasses elements to be used across print and digital design. For example brochures, mugs, flyers, logos and icons for the website. These designs elements don’t change responsively they way they do on websites.

Graphic Design - more technical design - often with classically trained elements. Graphic Designers will work across a selection of rules, file types and mediums. Graphic Designers can work on branding but don’t deal with responsive design the way website designers do.

Having your branding created professionally will cover more than just logos, icons and colours. A branding designer will also work on your brand voice, images, how and where to use certain combinations of the brand etc.

The stronger your brand and brand guidelines, the better results you’ll have on your website as your website designer will know how and where to work with the brand, which will also help it feel cohesive when people go from your website to your printed materials or social channels.

The website copy is literally the most important part of the website. It leads the design as we build imagery, sections etc around the blocks of text. It tells Google what your website is about, and it connects with your ideal clients, convincing them to choose you to work with/buy from.

Most people will think they can write their own website copy as they know themselves and their services inside out. Google, and your future customers won’t see it this way. The structure of writing for websites is way different to anything else you’ve written (including blog posts) and, you know the different titles of different sizes (you’ll see them peppered throughout websites) they mean something to Google. Get these wrong and you’ll literally be telling Google not to show people your website in search results.

If you can’t afford to have a copywriter write your website content for you, at the very least book a power hour or two with one and learn how to structure and write your website copy.

Need a recommendation for a copywriter? Get in touch, I know some good ones!

I really recommend you have a brand shoot done. It’s not enough just to use stock photography - they always stop people from feeling connected with the website - and an occasional headshot. A brand photoshoot tells a story; of your services, how they work, what you’re like. The photos also will last for the next few years and will help to have a seamless transition between your social media and your website. If you haven’t had a brand shoot or don’t know any brand photographers, ask your website designer as they will know, and have worked with, some.

Shoutout to the brilliant branding photographer who did my photos: Natasha Jay Photography. She’s a dream to work with and if you’re based in the Hampshire/London areas I recommend you look her up.

If you really can’t afford a brand photographer then look at taking a short selfies course like Rosie Parson’s Slay Your Selfies course. Which will help you to create some stunning photography for your website.

Please remember that website designers aren’t graphic designers so please send images which are ready for the website and don’t ask them to remove people/backgrounds/photoshop the images.

When you’ve invested a lot of time and money into a new website you’re going to want Google to be able to find it pretty quickly. This comes down to SEO (search engine optimisation) and this includes AI search results and ChatGPT.

Website designers are usually good at SEO structure on websites but that’s just one piece of the SEO puzzle. For the rest, you’ll need an SEO specialist like Nikki Pilkington. A lot of SEO gets done once the website has been built, but having an SEO specialist look over, and mark-up your website copy for the designer to work off, can help the website get off to a flying start.

Most people have heard of someone who's had a nightmare with their website designer or developer. They’ll complain about having been ghosted or projects running massively over timescales….

Not all website experiences are created equally so finding out what the process of working with the person building your website is, will go a long way to understanding expectations.

I created a blog post: What my website design process looks like, so my clients could always refer back to it and know what stage of the process we are at and what the next steps look like.

The main things you need to know are:

You should also find out what happens when the website is ready to go live - does the designer upload the website onto your own hosting? Are they planning on hosting it for you? If you have existing email accounts will these be affected? Knowing these things in advance will help you get everything organised for when the website is ready to go live.

The next thing is to work out which designer or developer you’d like to work with on your new website. Don’t be afraid to talk to a few and check out their testimonials. If it’s a large investment then you can ask to speak to some of their previous clients, to hear about their experience.

If you’d like help shaping your brief or planning your next website project, book a call with me and we’ll talk it through together.