A brief is simply details of what you want from your website. Having this in writing and agreed with your chaplaincy council before you start is helpful to keep sight of why you are creating a website. 

Purpose

Why are you undertaking this new website project? 

Audiences

Who is your website for and what needs do they have? Reading through Church of England Personas research, which was developed specifically for audiences online/digital, may help you think about and understand the needs of your own audience(s) better.  You may have already started this as part of your wider communications work of course; Audiences.

Functionality

Once you have established your audience and have an understanding of their needs, it will inform the type of functionality your site may need. In addition to the basics; your location, contact details, service times etc, will you need to list events, groups, and upload documents for visitors to view or download?

Assets

What site assets do you have? This will include the written content, photographs and documents you may want to share. Our next steps about conducting a Content Inventory and Audit will help you think about this in more detail.

Project Management and Build

Who will manage your project and who will build the site?  It could be the same person or an agency may be involved. Alongside creating a solid brief, organising who will run the project and other responsibilities at the start can save you time and possibly even money.

Governance

How will your project be governed?  Is one person making all the decisions, or are there other stakeholders who need to be consulted or give their approval at certain stages of the project? It's important to factor this into your overall project planning.

Maintenance

After the project is complete, who will look after and maintain the site? Are there daily responsibilities like answering enquiries from a contact form, weekly updates like adding new service times, or creating and publishing news stories? Depending on your site and its hosting options, there may also be more technical requirements such as security and platform updates. Who will have access to the site - passwords and editing rights. 

Measurement

How will you evaluate your site and its success? Think about what you want to understand about your visitors and how they interact with your site and other digital communications, such as newsletters. Adding Google Analytics can be an easy first step to develop a baseline of statistics with which to build on.