Building a new website for your brand can be a stressful job. With so much to consider it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you need to plan before anything can be designed or built. What pages do you need? What should the text say? Will the designer understand your vision?
The key to success for any project is organisation and great planning so we’ve put together a list of things you should have ready before approaching a web designer to design your website. Do not even think about planning your pages or thinking about the final design until you have this whole list sorted.
In reality it’s quite easy to put this stuff together once you know what you need. Whether you're building your website yourself or commissioning one from a web designer the process is the same, so let’s get started!
Your brand is the centre of everything you do whether you are a startup, a local business, an individual or a multinational corporation. Creating a strong brand identity will provide answers and support for everything else you do, including building or commissioning a website.
If you’ve already worked on your brand you might have a lot of what we’re about to talk about figured out but if not then defining and developing your brand identity is a vital step.
A brand is more than just the name or a logo, a brand stands for everything that you’re about as an organisation or individual. What your brand really does is communicate your approach to the solutions you provide. What does that mean? Take a look at a famous brand such as the fashion house Burberry. When you think of Burberry what might come to mind is their distinctive tartan pattern or their iconic trench coat design.
What these are really though are expressions of the company's approach to solving the original problem that the founder Thomas Burberry was trying to solve, how to clothe people involved in outdoors activities who at the time had to wear heavy and uncomfortable outwear.
Burberry’s approach was to provide stylish, modern and well engineered solutions where quality and design trump cost-effectiveness and mass production. Burberry isn’t made for everyone but those who it is made for will pay the premium for high quality and iconic design. This comes across in everything that the company does.
When commissioning a website it’s important that you can communicate your own brand clearly. Aspects of your brand will inform the design and make sure that the final product hangs together well. In order to develop your brand and communicate it effectively you will need to consider the following.
Once you have clear answers to these questions you can build a brand around them. Brand name, logo, colour schemes, image choice and even how you write copy for your website will all stem from your answers to these questions.
Once your branding is sorted you’ll need to gather assets for the website.
These assets should be collated and made available to your web designer in one well-organised folder (probably as a zip file) and shared using a cloud link service such as Google Drive, Dropbox or WeTransfer.
Below we give a run down of each type of asset along with a brief description and some important things to remember.
The brand name of the organisation or individual that the website will promote. As mentioned previously, your brand identity is the cornerstone of everything else that your business or organisation will do going forward.
This doesn’t have to be the brand’s final form, many brands develop over time. But it should be something you can build on for now and develop going forward.
The preferred primary domain name is the URL or address that your website can be found at, eg https://google.com.
This may just be YourBrandName.com or could include keywords from your industry (although this is much less important these days as SEO practices have changed in recent years).
It's down to you which domain name you choose but it also depends on what’s available (someone else may have taken your first choice). You can try out different domain names at a website like https://namecheap.com to see what’s available.
If you don’t have a brand logo yet you can either commission a designer to create a logo for your brand or use your brand name in a stylised font. Commissioning a logo can be expensive but if it’s done right it will give you a unique icon that you can build the rest of your brand upon.
Your brand name in a stylised font is the quicker and cheaper way to go and can serve as a stop-gap if you plan on adding a logo to your brand later on.
If you have a logo that has variations on colour or layout then provide all these variations along with guidance on when to use particular layouts or colours to really impress your web designer and make a friend for life. Logos and other graphics assets such as illustrations should be provided in high-resolution and standard formats such as PNG or JPG.
It’s advisable to provide any cornerstone fonts to your web designer in the either TFF or WOFF formats. If your font is not currently in this format you can use a converter like the one linked here.
We usually suggest that a brand should utilise a maximum of 3 or 4 fonts across marketing materials to maintain cohesiveness and a strong sense of brand identity.
It’s also important to check the licensing status of the fonts you use. Many fonts including all the google fonts available here are free to use for commercial products but some found on the internet or provided as part of a software package may be free for personal use only.
If the font you plan to use isn’t open source and you don’t have a licensing agreement with the author then you could be liable for expensive licensing fees so check first! If you need help with this your web designer should be able to check for you.
Creating a clear colour scheme including 1-2 main colours plus 3-4 secondary colours will help your web designer to align your website with your brand and keep all of your marketing materials feeling like part of a cohesive strategy.
Colours can be taken from images and videos you like and fed into colour palette generators like the one here.
At this stage you don’t need to have all of the text for your website finalised but it is a good idea to have important chunks of copy somewhat developed at least.
It’s very likely that your website will include copy describing your brand and what you do so it’s a great idea to have some drafts written in the style and vibe you want to present your brand, be it formal, casual, warm, humorous etc.
Establishing the tone of voice as well as some basic copy will help both you and your web designer develop the website inline with the brand. It will also significantly help you or any copywriters you commission to create more text for your other pages.
Images can make or break the look and feel of a website. Quality, high-resolution images will not only pull the website’s design together but also add context to the text while providing the added bonus of an SEO boost.
You can source images by either hiring a professional photographer or by using royalty-free stock photography services such as Unsplash. While stock images are a quick and cost effective solution, unique images from a photographer that showcase your brand will always provide the most benefit and give website visitors insight into what makes your brand special.
When providing images to your web designer it’s important to provide hi-res versions, clearly labelled and in JPG format so that they can navigate through them easily and make your website pop!
Including other media such as video and audio can make your website more interesting to visitors and also give you an SEO bump. Video and audio clips can add lots of context to a subject that might be difficult to understand (or a bit boring) on a page featuring just text and images.
For video and audio, upload your files to a service like Youtube or Soundcloud that provide a link to embed their player into your web pages. This is much better than uploading the original file to your own website and will help to keep your website loading quickly.
It’s easy to get carried away and take on a huge project that’s complicated to plan and eventually finish, but it’s important to remember that you don’t need to do it all at once. It’s often much better to start small and add well planned extensions to the website later on.
Your budget will determine the scope of your project so it’s important to be realistic about what you can achieve within your budget. If you have to limit the scope of the initial project, make sure that your web designer understands how you want to develop your website in future so that they can design with that in mind.
Once you have all of that together it’s time to create a clear brief for your website. The brief will be really useful to both you and your web designer as it will lay out the important information about your brand, the scope of the project as well as expected delivery dates and deadlines.
Here's a full list of what a good brief for a website should outline…
Providing a brief containing this information to your web designer will allow them to give you an accurate quote and expected delivery timescale.
This might seem like a lot of work to do before you even order your website but it’s well worth it. While it’s fine if you don’t have 100% of the bits listed above together before seeking a quote for your website, you will need to have it all before the project is anywhere near finished so you might as well get as much of it ready beforehand as possible.
An added bonus is that by the time you have all of this in order you’ll likely have a very clear idea of what the website should look like in your mind and therefore be able to communicate your ideas easily.
The money you spend on a web designer is best used on them designing your website. The more time your web designer has to spend chasing you for hi-res images, copy or your social media links, the less time they can spend actually designing and building your website. So like life easy for yourself and your web designer!
In the end both you and your web designer want the same thing, a beautiful website that functions exactly how you want and provides lots of value to your visitors. The more organised and clear about the project you are, the better the final website will turn out.
