Web designers and marketers start a site design or re-design with a “website creative brief”, a short set of marching orders that boil down your business needs into concepts that can be translated into the words, pictures, buttons and boxes that make up a website. To write the brief, they’ll ask you a list of questions that make you think through who and what your site is for.
We put together our own creative brief questionnaire below. If you’re going to work with a web designer or choose a site design from a menu offered by a web services company or just want to assess if your current website is doing its job, start your thinking here.
(Hint: If you can’t answer these questions with a few words, you haven’t given it enough thought.)
Number One Question
- Why do you want a new website?
Your Customers
- Who is your target customer? (Include location, demographics, lifestyle or whatever else pegs the audience for your site.)
- What customer problem do you solve?
- What makes you better able to solve the problem than your competitors?
- Why should a customer believe you?
- What’s the #1 action you want a customer to take on the site or as a result of visiting the site?
Your Business
- Give a short sentence (or three keywords) to describe your business.
- What’s the personality of your business? If it were an animal, what would it be?
- Tell the story of your business or how you started the business.
- What’s really cool or useful about your product or service?
Models, for Better or Worse
- What brands inspire you? Why?
- What websites do you like? Don’t like?
- What do your competitors’ sites have that you wish yours had?
- What frustrates you about your current site?
Look and Feel
- What’s the tone of the site you want? The style? For example, see the list of style choices (“Fresh”, “Modern”, etc.) on the website creative brief questionnaire for Limeshot Graphic Design and Branding.
For more about creative briefs from the designer’s point of view, check these posts by Jill Lynn Design and Limeshot Design. And to fully understand the creative process, see this road map from VirusComix.com.
Image: From Limeshot Graphic Design and Branding‘s creative brief questionnaire
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