Website Design Brief Template
We've created a generic website design brief template, great for people thinking about working with us or agencies looking for a good starting point
Website design briefs come in all shapes and sizes. At TheDMA, we have seen every manner of brief from formal structured requests for tender from government agencies to more informal phone calls! A good brief is often the starting point of any work. For us the process is:
- Website design brief (covering the issues in the template below),
- Written agreement on work, payment terms, project management etc,
- Commence design and build.
For an intangible service such as building a website, we believe that a good clear written understanding of requirements is an essential starting point for getting a good result. From a client’s point of view, it helps to clarify and summarise thinking around issues. From the agency’s point of view, it provides a clear instruction on what is to be done. For both parties, it outlines how the results will be measured.
For some jobs, the website design brief can be more informal, and done through discussion of requirements. So the website design brief templates will be specific to your requirements. If you are an individual or organisation putting this together before requesting proposals, you may want to include a number of questions about project management, timelines and resources which will help you decide between competing agencies. If you are an agency – you may wish to add questions related to how you build websites, the technology you use, and your services.
We have decided to provide a generic website design brief template that can be used by people thinking about working with us, organisations looking to have a website built, and by agencies looking for a good starting point to improve their website design brief template.
We are releasing this under the Creative Commons Attribute License, which means you are free to use and reproduce this, just please attribute TheDMA as original author, and link back to this post!
Thank for kindly sharing a file that does not exist. I think maybe it might have been awesome had the file been actually available for download. But I guess I haven’t seen a “Not Found” page in quite a while
Sadly, the link is giving a 404 error and agree with Nasser’s comment that this would have been a great resource. Even if you right click to ‘Save as’ the file downloads but there is no file present when you try to unzip.
Apologies, the error has been fixed, try the link again – it works now!
Thanks! Working fine now. Useful.
I’m still getting a 404
Hello Sonja, sorry there was a bit of a problem with the download, try again now it’s working again
Thank you very much, I managed to download it, the content will be very useful. You rock !
Also, this means I can tweet share !
Thank you very much :) TAFE life much easier now
Glad to help out!
Thank you for this user-friendly and to-the-point template. Greatly appreciated!
Hi Peter
Nice to see an agency sharing their briefing docs. I thought you might be interested in an online cloud-based briefing tool that we’re developing to make agency briefs more effective, more efficient and totally collaborative (plus you can automatically convert a brief to a quote).
You can check it out at http://signup.briefhive.com
Feel free to email me if you would like more info.
Cheers
Shaun
Thanks for providing your design brief for others to use…much appreciated :)
Thanks for the template. Came in very handy to manage a website build for a friend.
Hi. I’ve been asked to write an elearning module around getting a design brief for a web site. I note that you’re releasing this document under Creative Commons Attribute License, but would like to be sure that you are happy for me to use this document as a learning resource in that course.
Hi Craig
No problem – happy for you to use the brief document.
Having a sitemap included in a web design brief means the web design team can quickly understand how complex the website should be. It’s a really helpful process to think about what pages there are and how they fit together. This is even more important when planning for SEO purposes.
Thanks for sharing. It sure helped a lot in reviewing my website briefing.
I like the valuable information you provide in your write-ups.
I shall bookmark your site and check again here frequently. I am quite
sure I’ll learn lots of new stuff right here! Best of luck for the next!