No website project fails because the shade of blue was wrong. Projects fail because the brief was thin at the start. The designer guesses, the client waits, and eight weeks later everyone is debating a homepage that never had a clear job in the first place.
Kickoff is the cheapest moment to fix that. Before wireframes, before mood boards, before anyone opens a design file, spend a couple of hours gathering the ten things below. You don't need polished answers. You need enough that a designer can make confident decisions without emailing you twice a day.
This is the checklist we send to clients ahead of a kickoff, with notes on how to prepare each item.
1. Name the Goal and How You'll Know It Worked
1. The business goal, in one sentence. "We need a new website" is not a goal; it's a reaction to one. Push a level deeper. Are you trying to bring in better-qualified enquiries, cut the number of routine support emails, launch a product, or look credible enough that a particular buyer returns your call? Write that sentence down and keep it visible for the whole project. When a decision stalls later, this is the tiebreaker.
2. One primary measure, two secondary ones. Choose something you can genuinely check: completed contact forms, demo bookings, signups, enquiries from a specific page, or how often sales hears "I found you online." Skip totals that only ever move in one direction. If you have no baseline today, note that as well, so you have something honest to compare against in six months.
2. Describe the People on the Other Side of the Screen
3. Two or three audience groups, described plainly. Resist the urge to list everyone. Pick the people who actually pay you, plus anyone who influences them. For each group, note what they already know, what they're worried about, and what they need to see before they get in touch. A first-time buyer researching options and an existing client looking for a service page are not the same visitor, and they won't use the same navigation.
4. Evidence, not assumptions. Dig out what your audience has already told you. Search terms people use to find you, the five questions your inbox receives most often, objections raised on sales calls, the pages visitors leave from. Even a short list of real questions is worth more than a persona document nobody reads. If you have analytics access, share it at kickoff rather than discovering it in week six.
3. Get the Content Under Control
5. An honest content inventory. Before layout is discussed, know what content exists, what's missing, and what should disappear. For each page or section, note where it stands:
- Keep — accurate, still useful, just needs reformatting.
- Rewrite — the substance is right but the wording, structure or length is not.
- Create — nothing exists yet and someone has to write it from scratch.
- Retire — outdated, duplicated, or serving no one.
The "create" column is where deadlines go to die, so count it carefully and decide early who's doing the writing: you, a staff member, or a copywriter brought in for the project.
6. One person who owns content. Design can't start on a page that has no words and no decision-maker. Name a single person responsible for delivering text, images and approvals, and agree on dates for each batch. Shared ownership is the same as no ownership.
4. Hand Over Brand Assets Properly
7. Files, not screenshots. A logo pulled from a PDF or a social profile will not survive contact with a hero section. Send the original vector files (AI, EPS, SVG or PDF), the web fonts you're licensed to use, your exact colour values, and photography at full resolution. If some of it lives only on a former designer's hard drive, say so now and we'll work around it.
8. Rules and permissions. If you have brand guidelines, share them. If not, tell us what's flexible and what isn't: can the palette be extended, can the logo sit on a photograph, is there a tone of voice you want carried through the copy? Confirm you have the right to use every image, icon and font you hand over, particularly stock photography and anything shot by a contractor.
5. Answer the Technical Questions Early
9. The technical ground. Most delays trace back to a platform nobody mentioned. Bring the details below to kickoff so they can be checked rather than untangled later:
- Who controls the domain name and hosting, and do you have login access?
- What the site is built on now, and whether it stays.
- Any systems the site must talk to: CRM, email marketing, booking, ecommerce, payments, membership.
- Analytics, tracking and cookie consent already in place.
- Security, privacy or compliance requirements specific to your sector.
This is also the moment to flag accessibility expectations and any legal pages you'll need, such as privacy policies or terms. If your industry has specific regulatory obligations, check those with a qualified professional rather than assuming a designer will catch them.
10. Constraints: deadline, budget, approvers. Give a realistic launch window and the reason behind it, even if the reason is "the trade show." Share a budget range so the scope matches it instead of being cut later. Then list who signs off, and how many rounds of revision that involves. A project with four approvers and no named decision-maker will drift, however good the design is.
How to Run the Kickoff Itself
Send this checklist a week ahead so people arrive with answers rather than blank looks. Book ninety minutes, invite the decision-maker alongside the day-to-day contact, and treat it as a working session: open the content inventory, click through the old site, look at three competitor sites and say out loud what works and what doesn't. Record it if you can, or have someone take notes.
Within two days, ask for a one-page written summary: goal, audience, measure, content owners, technical setup, constraints, and the next three actions with names and dates attached. That page becomes the reference point for every design review that follows. Get it right, and the rest of the project feels calm. Skip it, and you'll rebuild the brief one email at a time.
Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay
