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

Digital Marketing
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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!

Download Website Design Brief Template (.doc file)

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Nasser says

    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

  2. Craig says

    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.

  3. Shaun says

    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

  4. Craig Delahoy says

    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.

  5. kerclichasi.science says

    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.

  6. Website Design Oakville says

    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!

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