Plan the Website Before You Prompt It

There has always been a gap between deciding to have a website and having one. It was filled with quotes, mockups, revisions and waiting — and somewhere in that gap, most people were forced to work out what the site was actually for.

That gap has largely closed. You can now describe a business in a sentence and have twenty pages of website by the end of the evening.

Which means the thinking that used to happen by accident now has to happen on purpose.

What AI will do if you do not

Ask a model to write a website for a plumbing business and it will produce a good one, for a plumbing business it has invented. Service areas, years of experience, a friendly team, a guarantee. None of it is true of you, all of it reads convincingly, and on a brand-new site there is nothing anywhere to contradict it.

This is not the model behaving badly. You asked for a website for a plumber, and it has no way to know which one.

The decisions nobody can make for you

A website is a series of decisions before it is a series of pages.

What is this site actually for, expressed as something you can measure — sign-ups, enquiries, bookings, not "more customers"? Who is the visitor, and what are they trying to do in the ninety seconds they will give you? What do you offer that the three competitors they are also looking at do not? What are you willing to spend, and does that mean building it yourself or hiring someone? What has to be true on launch day for this to have been worth doing?

None of that is writing. It is judgement about your business and your money, and it is the part that determines whether the site works.

The brief that works on everyone

Here is the useful part: the document that answers those questions is not an AI artefact. It is a brief, and it works on everyone.

Give it to a designer and you get a quote based on what you actually need. Give it to a developer and the questionnaire fills itself in. Give it to a freelancer and you stop paying for the two rounds of revisions that exist only because nobody agreed what the site was for.

And give it to an AI tool — stored in a project or your custom instructions, so every request inherits it — and the drafts come back sounding like your business, because for the first time it knows what your business is.

Two rules make it work. Ask it to confirm before it drafts, so a misreading gets caught before it becomes twenty pages. And tell it to ask rather than invent, which is the single instruction that prevents the confident fabricated detail.

Where AI earns its place in a build

Once the plan exists, AI is genuinely useful in more of the project than the copy:

• Drafting each page from the plan, one at a time
• Generating twenty domain or page-name options so you can reject nineteen
• Turning your brief into a scope document or developer questionnaire
• Explaining a technical choice well enough that you can ask a freelancer a sharper question

What stays with you: prices, credentials, testimonials, guarantees, anything a customer could hold you to, and the legal pages that describe what you really do with people's data.

Start with the plan

The instinct is to get better at prompting. Better prompts help for one conversation, then you start again.

A website plan is written once and outlives the build. The rebuild in three years starts from it. The next designer reads it. Adding a service changes one section rather than starting over.

Our course Website Planning works through the whole sequence — goals, ideal visitor, UVP, branding, layout, content, domain, build route and launch. The first two chapters are free and need no card.

The last chapter is the one this post is about: taking the plan you have just written and using it as the brief, whether the thing you hand it to is a person or a model.