Most website projects go wrong before a single line of code is written. The problems that surface mid-build — changing direction, scope creep, content that does not fit the design, a result that nobody is quite happy with — almost always trace back to the same root cause: the strategy was never settled before the design started.
These are the questions worth answering in writing before any design conversation begins.
Who is this website for?
Not in the abstract — specifically. “Small businesses” is not an answer. “Owners of service businesses with two to ten staff who are struggling to differentiate themselves from cheaper competitors” is an answer. The more precisely you can describe the primary visitor, the more useful every subsequent decision becomes.
This question is harder than it looks. Most businesses want to appeal to everyone. That impulse, followed in design, produces sites that appeal to no one in particular. Choosing who to speak to most directly is a strategic decision, not a marketing preference.
What does a visitor need to understand, feel, and do?
Understand: what does the right visitor need to know about your business for the site to be useful to them? Not everything — the essential things.
Feel: what impression should they leave with? Trust is the obvious answer, but trust is a consequence of specifics. Trust built by seeing client results is different from trust built by understanding your process. Know which kind of trust you are building.
Do: what is the one action you want a ready visitor to take? Contact form, phone call, booking, purchase — pick one. Design the site around that action. Everything else is secondary.
How will people find this site?
This question shapes structure and content in ways design cannot fix later. A site primarily found through organic search needs different content architecture than one driven by direct referrals. A site that will be linked in proposals needs a different emphasis than one competing for cold search traffic.
If the answer is “I’m not sure yet,” that is important information. It means the marketing strategy and the website strategy need to be settled together, not sequentially.
What does success look like, and how will you measure it?
A website without measurement is a website without feedback. Before building, decide what a successful site generates — enquiries per month, booking rate, time on key pages — and set up the tracking to measure it. This is not an afterthought. It is how you know whether the investment was worthwhile.
The first conversation in any project I take on covers these questions before anything visual is discussed. If that process sounds useful to go through together, get in touch.