Need "A Brief" for Speccing a Website

[JRA]

Hello all - the powers that be here want to pay some external company billions* to build and host a website for us. Advised against it but ultimately no worries for me, stops it being my problem!

 

My manager though (poor guy) has been tasked with contacting all sorts of web design companies and people, and has been asked for "a brief for the website" a couple of times. We both looked at each other and none of us know what that is or how to write one!

 

Do any of you good folks know what one is? Is it a "sensible" document with statements like "optimised for mobile devices and desktops" and "HTML5, no flash or java" or is it a "not-sensible" document full of "customer focused" and "empowering audiences"?

 

Guh? Thanks for any replies.

[Geoff]

Ok, you'll need the following sections:

 

About your school - Explain who you are, what you do, the usual fluff. You can probably lift something out of the school prospectus.

Old Website - Tell them what you like / don't like about the current site. How much it is used. What it is used for. Some stats about traffic levels.

New Website - What you want the new website to do. What features you need. Point to other school websites as examples too.

Budget - Tell them how much money there is for this. If ongoing support is required. Also any further bugetary allocations that are likely in the years ahead.

Look and Feel - Knock up some example pages in a graphics editor to show them what sort of look you are going for. You can also point to any other website to show them the style you are looking for.

Technical - Nuts and bolts stuff you'll be familiar with. Who manages the DNS. What OS is the web server running. What software stack is being used. Any particular CMS requirements. will clients access the site via desktop, mobile or both?

Marketing - Is any Digital or Traditional marketing required when the site launches? Any ongoing marketing requirements? Any SEO required? Social Media / Email Newsletters / etc?

Edited July 28, 2017 by Geoff

[jmak]

There is a list of statutory requirements that you need to publish. Every detail is checked during an ofsted inspection, including revision dates in any documents you publish. Details here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/what-maintained-schools-must-publish-online#history

 

Responsive design is more or less essential - most traffic to ours is from mobile devices and you don't want to be updating two sites.

 

A good starting point is looking at other schools' websites - find some you like and look at who created them. It could give you an idea whether it's within your capability to do something similar or of who to go to for quotes.

 

Consider very carefully how it is updated and how much you will charged for different types of updates - some will charge an outrageous price for some things like adding a page or revising the structure. You will also want granular permissions so that various staff members have permission to edit the content they're responsible for without being able to wreck the whole site.

 

Paying someone else to do it can be good value as it does take quite a lot of time to set up and manage, but it's also quite doable to run it in house. Just make sure that enough time is allocated.

[elsiegee40]

And from our inspection - make the statutory stuff easy to find. No more than 2 clicks. It took 3 for some of ours and they "couldn't find" them

[jmak]

And from our inspection - make the statutory stuff easy to find. No more than 2 clicks. It took 3 for some of ours and they "couldn't find" them

^^ This.

 

I came to the conclusion a while ago that the home page is for parents and the rest of the website is for the benefit of ofsted for their risk assessments to decide whether they need to inspect you. I ended up creating a page called "Statutory Publications" with links to every document or webpage listed on the DfE website.

 

The other people who can't click more than two links (or use the site search in the header of every page) are governors when they're checking that the website is ofsted compliant.

 

Homepage: latest news, calendar, link to payments system, how to contact us information, pretty pictures. If you're a parent, how often do you want more than that.

[NotSoFast]

Worth remembering it's also the first thing potential candidates for vacancies at the school look at too.

[Ketlane]

I was at a Companies House presentation recently where the Intellectual Property people also spoke. Pointed out that you need to be ultra-careful with copyright. If the contract says the contractor holds the copyright, then if you want out of the contract you lose the website design as well.

[Meldrew]

I was at a Companies House presentation recently where the Intellectual Property people also spoke. Pointed out that you need to be ultra-careful with copyright. If the contract says the contractor holds the copyright, then if you want out of the contract you lose the website design as well.

This. I would want to know exactly what happens if you want to move to a different host. Get it in writing too.

[AlanD]

I like the idea of large parts of the web site being content driven - which allows several contributors to be able to modify generic files which are then picked up and displayed by the web site - without that contributor necessarily knowing how to write in HTML on anything about a special editor. Some form of tracking (probably using cookies) is useful - to get feed back about what is being looked at....or never looked at. It has been known that schools know when they are about to be inspected because of tracking web site activity!