Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Focus on adding value to your customers. The website may be designed keeping this in mind. Let your agency come up with ways of adding more value to your clients through website.

---Ravee

The best thing you can do is to create a short web site strategy. State specifically the target visitor's profile, what you want them to do when on the site, what you want them to do after visiting (what they take away), and how you intend to get targeted visitors (search engines, Adwords, ads, sales force).

Create as different a value proposition as you can and put it in the brief.

List any logo brand restrictions (sorry guidelines).

Choose some websites you like and indicate what you like about them.

Then choose a really experienced marketing web developer company to interpret what you said and turn it into a great web site.

Harry Hallman

I think a good web development company should be supplying you with a design brief. They ought to have a lot of experience in usability and positioning -- not just making a pretty site that's navigable.

That isn't to say that you won't have to have lots of input and do plenty of work... but they should be guiding the process, not just implementing your instructions. You will have to supply them with plenty of information -- e.g., your brand personality, your product/service positioning, goals and objectives, etc. But at a minimum, the design company should know what questions to ask and have a thorough discovery document to guide you through this process.

Harry Hallman has the right idea.

The design brief (a/k/a "creative brief") needs to lay out the Positioning Statement and any other requirements for the site, so that the design team doesn't have to guess what you want. Think of it as the spec sheet against which you want them to work (and the basis for evaluating what they deliver). The format isn't important. The content is.

If you haven't read The Big Red Fez : How to make any web site better, then you might want to do that. In a nutshell it says that you need to figure out what it is you want site visitors to DO before you begin to design the site.

Hi, Wanamaker. I agree that in theory a good agency could provide you with this document, but in actuality I have had to create these on my own, as they can include so much detail and the internal web site "champion" is the one most likely to put in the necessary effort.

I have a background marketing for software companies, where a "Marketing Requirements Document" (or MRD) is written any time a new product is developed, to ensure that all the needed features are included in the new software product. So I actually write an MRD before developing a new web site. If you search the web for "MRD" or "Marketing Requirements Document", you will probably find some good samples. They are so detailed that features are usually numbered -- 1.2, 1.2, 1.3 and so on. Good luck--