Creating a Website Brief
Planning your site
Question 1. Why do you want a website? Answers and Comments Considerations and Ideas This is about understanding what it was that led you to think of a website as a solution for what your organisation wants to achieve. Most organisations start with ‘We need a website’ without thinking about why. Take a step back and look at what it was that led you to think that you needed a website in the first place. Put that in here. Having considered Question 1, and assuming that you still want a website you now need to think carefully about who this website is for. Examples Clients, Board members, Service users, Potential service users, Funders, Policy Makers, Colleagues in the sector, Media, General public, Donors, Volunteers, Local community Local, Regional, National, International What, specifically, do you want the website to do for you? This should link into your ideas from Question 1. Some examples are: To publicise your service To have up to date information available To reach people who don’t currently use the service To enable networking To develop or expand services To campaign
2. Who is it for and who is the priority?
3. What is the geographical target? 4. What is the purpose of the website?
To fundraise To raise profile To communicate to key groups To interact with key groups To have an online booking service 5. Measuring success – how you are going to know to what extent your website is meeting its purposes This is about setting targets to help you to understand if, what you are doing on the website is having the desired effect. Eg ‘To raise profile’ success measurement could be ‘An increase in traffic to particular pages’. Other possible success measurements may be: To be on page 1 of Google For visitors to be able to find what they are looking for within 10 seconds. For visitors to regularly revisit the site To keep visitors to the site on the site For visitors to bookmark the site To increase donations To gain volunteers via the site You now know what you want to measure. This will indicate how you are going to measure it. Examples are: Google analytics – site statistics reports Online/offline polls Telephone questionnaires Number of people using a service/booking an event Just having a website is only the beginning of working towards what you want to achieve. It will only be effective if people are going to use it. How are you going to market your site to each of your target audiences? Include Search Engine Optimisation in your website design.
6. How will you measure your success?
7. Marketing – how are you going to publicise your website?
Designing your Site
Question 8. Content – These are the main button headings on the website. Answers and Comments Considerations and Ideas These are the menu buttons that will appear on the Home page. They may also have sub menus coming off from them in a drop down or similar style. Where this is the case try not to have further sub menus coming off the sub menus as this makes for difficult navigation. The main menu buttons may include: Home, About us, Contact us Others might include: Search, Links, Gallery, Information, Support, Training, Events, Donations, etc The aim of this section is to get a feel for the style or look of your new website. Online research is needed here looking at other websites. Try to focus on the look of the sites rather than what they say or how easy they are to navigate. Some questions to prompt your research are: Who are your competitors? What sites do you like and why? What are the important aspects of your site design? Do you have a logo? What colour is it? What words or phrases best describe your organisation? How is your organisation perceived by your clients? Look at Mr Site for example websites. Consider accessibility issues. All websites
9. Design
10. Accessibility
should be accessible, but what are the main accessibility issues for your target audiences? For further information on accessible websites visit the accessibility pages on the Cosmic site. 11. Management of the site Once the site is up and running it will need to be maintained, developed and kept up to date. Who is going to look after the site and take responsibility for which sections of the site? There are many options for building a site from simple DIY to Web developer. Whoever develops the site you will need to take into account who is going to maintain and update it. If this is done in house you will need to have the skills to do so. A very basic or simple DIY solution will enable this as will a web developer providing this is stipulated to them. More difficult and therefore more restrictive are the hard DIY and software options. Very basic DIY – Limited templates Examples - Communitykit, Communigate, DIY Simple CMS – Basic training needed Examples - Moonfruit - £35/y MrSite - £35/y Wordpress – free DIY Hard CMS – Significant training needed Examples - Joomla Drupal Software DIY Examples - Dreamweaver - £350/£400 Frontpage - £100
12. Options – How do you want to develop your site?
Web Developer – Min £500 13. Budget How much have you got to spend? Make sure you include in your budgeting maintenance, training, hosting, technical support as well as the design costs. Don’t forget the indirect costs eg time. Plan the website in terms of what you want to have done and by when eg: Site structure in place by date First draft with content by date Site reviewed and finalised by date
14. Timescales