brandarticles marketing Giving a website brief part 2
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Web Designers and Agencies
Thinking about how you want your website to look is likely to be the easy and enjoyable part. Getting it to work properly and effectively is much more complex but, in reality, equally (and arguably more) important. After all, if your website can’t be found it doesn’t really matter how it looks. So there are some important areas to look at when building your site.
Tecnhical requirements
As mentioned before, it is not necessary for you to have any technical knowledge about websites but it is important to consider all the technical needs of your business. This might be your finance department’s requirement(s), if you are considering e-commerce. It may also be reports generated specifically for your sales department or export figures for your marketing department. Think smart, think joined up.
Websites today are not just a shop front that drives you to a phone line or a replica of your brochure, they should be interactive and add real value to your business and it’s processes.
Involve other selected people in the briefing process to make sure you maximise the return of your development costs in improving the effectiveness of your business processes.
1 Is the site purely public facing or does it need to run secure areas for clients or internal purposes?
2 Is it an intranet or extranet site only?
- intranet – a local or restricted communications network, esp. a private network created using World Wide Web software.
- extranet - an intranet that can be partially accessed by authorised outside users, enabling businesses to exchange information over the Internet securely.
3 If it is an intranet, on what platform does it run (i.e. Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac)?
4 Are there any restrictions to development governed by your hosting company or because you use internal servers?
- Programming language i.e. Microsoft only ASP or Open Source PHP
- Security issues developers may need to be aware of i.e. FTP restrictions, HTTPS (SSL certificates), Internal firewalls.
5 Do you need to comply to certain disability access?
- Text only browsers
- Audio web browsers
- Braille readers
- Colour blindness
6 Does the site need to be compatible with mobile devices or web TV?
7 Reporting, what type of reporting do you need?
- Simple statistics
- Ad tracking (if you use on-line advertising)
- Submission tracking
8 Do you need specific data collection?
- Do you need to export data into a file? if so, what format do you need it (i.e. CSV or txt)
9 Does your site need to link in with specific internal systems?
- Bookkeeping systems
- Sales tracking software
- CRM systems
- Delivery systems
10 Is there any user specific functionality you require?
- Booking systems
- E-commerce functionality
- Links to social media
- Calendars etc.
Maintenance
This is a grey area often overlooked when briefing a website. Most companies believe they can run the upkeep of the website themselves, however, often this is not a realistic outlook.
There is a price to pay for using vital staff resources on an area that is not their core skill, both in terms of loss of staff time, and in delivering the right service to the user.
Maintenance is not purely the domain of updating copy of images but it is whole area that needs careful consideration. So consider the following:
1 Who will be responsible for the on-going general updating of the website?
2 Who is/will be responsible for the maintenance of the website? Updating of servers, code, domains etc.
3 Do you have the skills, resources and time to update the website in-house?
- If so, what happens if that member of staff leaves the company?
4 Would a maintenance plan with your website supplier be preferable, so they handle website updates and maintenance for a set fee or agreed hourly rates?
- Consider amount of updating actually required
- Back ups of the system for disaster recovery
- Load balancing for high traffic sites
- What maintenance of code/system updates it includes
Promoting your website
Along with spending a great deal of time and money on building your spangly new all-singing, all-dancing website you need make sure people see it. And the right people at that. So consider how you promote the website either on launch or ongoing.
Off-line promotion
A website should really be supported by an off-line strategy of promotion and advertising, consider including the following form of promotion:
- Direct mail shots to targeted recipients
- Promotional brochures
- Ongoing PR campaigns
- Sponsorship
- Complimentary Gifts
- Exhibitions
- General/Trade Advertising
Off-line promotion may not be the realm of the web development company you select but it is very important that all your outward facing communications align. In turn this means that it will be important that your agency or marketing department give strong visual guidelines to ensure that the website ties up with those off-line activities.
This may mean extra data collection on the website too. This can help streamline the process of using customer address details by using a central data storage facility. For example being able to apply addresses to the envelopes for your direct mail. In short - think smart!
On-line promotion
To complement off-line promotion, or indeed to replace it, you must consider how you intend to promote your website. Promoting your website, in terms of getting it listed on search engines and also building links with other websites, is vitally important to the continued success of your site.
It worth noting, that some areas of this type of promotion (such as SEM and SEO) are the realm of specialist web companies. Your developers may offer these services but it’s worth some time to fully understand what you really need.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) - is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) through the use of search engine optimisation, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the ‘natural’ or unpaid (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results. It can be a complex process and it’s important to get it right to give your website the best chance of being found by your audience.
SEM, SEO and link-building are vital ongoing activities, not optional extras. Without these your website will not have the search engine accessibility you both want and need.
Optimising a website may involve editing its content and associated coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords searches used on the search engines.
So what areas do you consider important to promoting your new website:
- Building link partners
- SEO and submission
- SEM paid listings (such as the sponsored links you see on the side of your search results)
- Email marketing campaigns/Newsletters
- Banner advertising on related trade website or high traffic volume websites
- Social Media Marketing
- What forums or blogs will you join and participate in?
Site mapping
Another useful tool to help make sure the proposal from your web developer is accurate and that you get what you ask for, is a site map. The best way to think of this is how the user will access the information in a simple hierarchy (a flowchart). How the information will be grouped.
Remember, all the information on your website is important to the various parts of your company, however, you cannot show all the links to these on the homepage. So your job is drive people to the right place as quickly and easily as possible. So think of a tree and use a simple flow chart to show where each level of your website resides. But also remember not to over think the map at the brief stage.
You can refine your initial site map with the help of your chosen web developer in the specification stage. They will have suggestions how to present the information in a user friendly way. They are the experts so use them. For the purposes of the brief create an initial roadmap. This will help you to collate the information you will need to deliver to them and the developer to checklist against for the development of the site.
Conclusion
Finish your website brief with an outline of what you expect back from the web developers. You may also wish to outline budgetary constraints you may have. This may impact on your wish list for your website.
You would typically expect feedback to be in the form of a full proposal, including details of how the site would be built, technologies to be employed, a site map, detailed costing with options, on-going costs, any licensing considerations, timescales, deliverables, any assumptions and other conditions of the proposal.
Then finish up with your contact details and expected timescales for you to receive the proposals and you may also wish to outline anticipated delivery of site deadlines at this point. A rule of thumb for websites is a development period of around 3 months not necessarily including testing. But for larger sites this can be much longer.
In terms of deliverables and timescales, it may be worth considering a planned rollout, rather than waiting and waiting for the whole site to be finished. This can give you valuable time to build up anticipation or capture new audiences.
And finally, always consider your website as a key component of your business process. A website should never simply be shoved up just because ‘we just need one don’t we’.
Today a website can, and needs to be, an essential tool in gaining and more importantly retaining customers. Along with all the functionality your company wants from the site, ultimately the website is a user experience, so don’t skimp on investing in good user-friendly design coupled with fantastic functionality that really delivers value to both parties.
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