Answer These Before You Pay Anyone to Build a Website

Website projects rarely fail on the build. They fail on scope, and scope fails because decisions arrive late.

The pattern is consistent. Three weeks in, someone asks whether there should be a booking form. Nobody had said. It gets added. Then the pricing page needs to exist because the booking form implies it, and the copy needs rewriting because the pricing changes what the home page promises. None of that was in the quote, and all of it was decidable on day one.

The decisions that belong at the start

What is this site for, as a number? "More customers" is a business goal. A website goal is the measurable thing the site does towards it: enquiries per month, bookings taken, sign-ups. If you cannot measure it, you will not be able to tell afterwards whether the money worked — and you will be arguing about the design instead.

Who is arriving, and what are they trying to do? Not demographics. The ninety seconds they will give you, and what they came to find out. A site built for the person you wish were visiting is a site optimised for nobody.

Why you rather than the three others they are also looking at? This one takes real thought and it is the sentence everything else hangs off. It is also the sentence you will be tempted to let someone else write, which is exactly the wrong instinct.

Which pages, and what does each one do? Not a sitemap. A list where every page has a job. Any page that cannot state its job is either missing content or should not exist.

What is explicitly not in this build? The most valuable line in any brief. Without it, every good idea anyone has for the next four months is arguably in scope.

The brief works on everyone

Here is the part that makes this worth doing properly rather than in your head.

The document that answers those questions is not a paperwork exercise. It is a brief, and the same one works on everybody you might hand the job to.

Give it to a designer and the quote is based on what you actually need rather than what they guessed. Give it to a developer and their questionnaire fills itself in. Give it to a freelancer and you stop paying for the two rounds of revisions that existed only because nobody had agreed what the page was for.

And give it to an AI tool — stored once, so every request inherits it — and the drafts come back sounding like your business rather than a generic one in your sector.

Especially now

There used to be a natural gap between deciding to have a website and having one, filled with quotes, mockups and waiting. Somewhere in that gap, most people were forced to work out what the site was for.

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

Which means the thinking that used to happen by accident now has to happen on purpose — and without it, what you get is a fluent website for a business the model invented, complete with service areas and a founding story that are not yours.

Where the money goes instead

None of this makes a website cheaper by itself. What it does is move the decisions to the point where changing your mind is free.

Changing your mind about the goal on day one costs nothing. Changing it in week five costs a rebuild of everything downstream of it, and that is the overrun, every time.

Our course Website Planning works through the whole sequence — measurable goals, the ideal visitor, your value proposition, branding, layout, content, domain, build route and launch plan. What you end up holding is the brief. The first two chapters are free and need no card.