Briefing a 
new website. 
.

Building a website is a complex project. 

These questions break the necessary info down into an easy to digest check list to get you started:  

•	Why do you need a new website?
•	Is there anything you like about your current site (aesthetics/functionality)?
•	What don’t you like about your existing website?
•	What will people use your website for?
•	What will give your product/service the competitive edge?
•	What action(s) do you expect visitors to take on your website?
•	If we asked a visitor of your new website what they thought about it, 
what words would you want them to use?
•	Tell us what websites you like (from a functional or aesthetic perspective).
•	Are there specific features/tools that your website needs to include? 
Tell us about these and how they benefit your site visitors?
•	Please provide us with a site map which shows what pages you would like 
to feature in your new website, alternatively just list the pages you require
•	Do you need any special CMS features?
•	Can you list integrations (and brief purpose) to third party systems and whether they are bespoke? For example, CRM or ERP e.g. Microsoft Dynamics, custom API, Salesforce, etc.
•	How many content editors do you currently have? Do they have different levels of permission?
•	Which teams have access to the admin e.g. marketing, IT?
•	Which hosting provider is being used? e.g. Rackspace, Azure Cloud etc.
•	Are the servers cloud based or dedicated?
•	Who owns the hosting environment? e.g. client or supplier
•	Can you describe the hosting environment and services being used? For example, for an Azure Cloud site, it may be using App Service, Redis Cache, Azure SQL, Blob storage etc. We would 
be more than happy to discuss this with your Dev team and iron out the nitty gritty.
•	What type of emails does the site currently send and what is the volume?
•	Does the site take payments? If so, which payment gateway(s)/providers are being used? 
e.g. PayPal, WorldPay, SagePay, Stripe etc.
•	Is your site translated?  If so, can you list the languages available? What do you use for translation services e.g. machine (Google), internal or manual translation providers?
•	What third party services or license-based components are being used by the website and who owns the accounts (client or supplier)? For example, live chat, Mailchimp, pdf generation component, fonts, analytics/tracking, address lookup services, heat mapping, IP lookup services, maps etc.