Drupal for Designers

Chapter 4. Putting It in Practice—A Short-Form Project Brief

If you’ve taken a look at the project brief in Section 8, you’ve already seen the kind of information that goes into a long-form project brief, which is good for working with brand-new clients and projects. But what if you’re doing a quick, simple site for yourself, or a redesign of a site you’ve built one or more times before? In this case, you might want to create an abbreviated brief that focuses on just a few key items. For a short-form brief, you want to capture the following information:

Project goals

What are the goals of this new site or redesign? If you have information from the last time the site was designed, have any of those goals changed?

Personas/audience research

Who is the site looking to reach? Is it the same audience as the first time it was designed, or are you looking to tap into new markets? If personas exist from the last time the site was designed, how well do they align with what you know now?

Information architecture/content strategy

How will the site map need to change, if at all? What major sections of content will you need, and how much of that content do you have? How will the content be organized or tagged? This is where you can plan to spend the most time; in particular, pay attention to descriptive pages such as the “about” or “services” pages. How well does the current copy reflect the new audience and project goals? Don’t forget major chunks of content such as blogs, project lists, and so on—what ...