Last Updated on November 19, 2020
The web design brief is an important document and your designer should provide you with one to complete before work begins. The brief will be your instructions to your web designer, and should set out your design preferences. This will give your web designer a guide to work from when they prepare your design concepts.
Your web designer will provide you with the design brief that will ask you a number of questions about the website development. You may also need to provide them with a site flowchart so they know how many pages you require and what the links to these pages should be called. If your site is large the designer will probably do the site flow chart for you.
Design Brief Considerations:
The things that should be covered in a design brief include:
- Website Purpose & Objective
- The domain name to be used for the website address
- The target audience
- Design style i.e. conservative, colorful, natural, edgy, corporate
- Color scheme i.e. red & black, green & blue or, you may be asked for CMYK colors or html Hex codes.
- Font – you are limited to the number of fonts you can use on the Internet and your web designer will probably ask you to choose from Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana and Tahoma. If you have an unusual font that you want to use for headers then these will need to be created as images.
Color Codes
RBG, CMYK, PMS, & HEX Codes are all ways of specifying a color. Matching colors from a print document to an online document can be quite difficult.
RBG stands for Red, Blue and Green, and is the standard used for computer monitors. CMYK and PMS colors are for printing purposes, with CMYK standing for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black” and PMS stands for “Pantone Matching System” – see www.pantone.com.
Hex codes are used in html to specify a color and look like this #ffffff – which is the code for white.
If you use a color in printing and want it on your website ask your print company or graphic artist to give you an RGB equivalent, your web designer can then work out the Hex code from this.
What Font Type?
Sans serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana have been found to be more readable online than serif fonts like Times New Roman.
Hierarchical Page Flowchart
Your website flowchart should start with your homepage (index.html) at the top of your chart. The next level down will be for your primary or ‘top’ navigation structure, and it can then branch off from each top level with the sub-pages you want listed below. Preparing a chart in word or excel will be fine and even a hand drawn flowchart will suffice for most websites.
