04 The Redesign Process

Writing a brief

A brief is a short document that describes your project: your goals and objectives, your budget, your timeline. It’s what you hand to an agency or freelancer to kickstart discussions, and it gets everyone aligned before any work begins.

What should a brief include?

When writing a brief, you’ll likely want to include the following:

• Background information on your org (who you are and who you serve)
• Why you are considering a website redesign
• Who the site is for (your main audiences and what they want/need)
• The goals for the redesign
• How you’ll measure success (e.g. a 20% increase in enquiries)
• The budget (how much do you have allocated for this project?)
• Timeline (when do you want to launch?)
• What’s in scope and out of scope (one way to do this is to split features into must-haves and nice-to-haves)
• How the agency or freelancer should respond to the brief
• Who to contact about further questions

You might also want to include:

• Who’s writing the website content and whether it’s a migration or a rewrite
• Accessibility standards you need to meet
• Any system integrations that are required (e.g. mailing list software, CRMs)

Why sharing the budget is important

You’ll notice we’ve included the budget as part of the brief. We sometimes get pushback about this. We often hear things like: “If I share the budget, that’s what they’ll charge”.

Your budget is one of the main constraints for the project. A website can cost £2,000 or £200,000. Those two budgets create very different websites. Sharing your budget with an agency or freelancer should open up discussion about what is and isn’t possible. We strongly recommend starting this discussion as soon as possible.

Below are some rough ballpark figures for websites we’ve worked on:

• Small websites with low functional requirements – £5,000 – £15,000
• Mid-sized websites with some integrations/complexity – £15,000 – £50,000
• Larger charity websites with more complexity – £50,000+

If you don’t have an allocated budget – or don’t know how much you should spend – mention this in the brief.

Tips for writing a brief

Below are some tips and things to consider while writing the brief:

• Keep the document short. 4-8 pages is often enough for most projects.
• Make it clear what you plan to handle internally and what you’d want the agency or freelancer to do.
• Use simple, clear language. Remove as much ambiguity as possible (or make it clear where there is ambiguity or decisions still to be made).
• If you have supporting documents, it can make sense to provide these alongside the brief. For example: personas, additional research, audits of the current site, analytics, etc. Make reference to these in the brief.
• Don’t write it alone. Pull in the people who deal with your site day to day – sales, support or service teams, key stakeholders. The site exists to help them do their jobs, and they may spot things it needs to do that you’d miss on your own.

Problems, not solutions

When writing the brief, focus on the problems you’re trying to solve and the objectives you’re trying to meet. Don’t get too bogged down in how to solve those problems.

There are two spaces you’ll move between during a project: the problem space and the solution space. The problem space is where you do research, define the problem you’re solving, and set your goals and objectives. This is where the brief lives. The solution space is where you move into design, development, and implementation, coming up with ideas to solve that problem.

When you hire an agency or freelancer, you want to give them the space to be creative and come up with ideas.