Most website projects fail in the brief, not the build. By the time someone's chosen a designer and signed a quote, the things that will determine whether the site actually works for the business have usually been skimmed past.
So before we put a price on anything, we run through five questions. They're not a sales discovery script - they're the things we genuinely need to know before we can do good work.
1. What is this site for?
Sounds obvious. It's not. "We need a new website" is a starting position, not a goal. Underneath that sentence, a small business usually wants one of three things:
- Credibility. Someone has been recommended you and is checking that you exist and look professional before phoning.
- Lead generation. You want strangers to find you in search and convert into enquiries.
- Sales. You want to take money on the site itself.
The site you build for credibility is not the site you build for lead-gen, which is not the site you build for sales. Same designer, same brand, same studio - completely different decisions about page count, copy depth, photography, forms, integrations.
Get this one wrong and everything else is theatre.
2. Who is the customer, exactly?
"Anyone" isn't an answer. The most useful version of this question is: describe the last three customers who actually bought something.
Where did they find you? What did they do on a phone vs. a desktop? How much did they spend? Did they pay attention to the about page or did they skim straight to pricing? Did they care that you're local?
Real customers - the ones already converting - tell you more about who the site is for than any persona document.
3. Where will the traffic come from?
A beautiful website with no traffic is a piece of expensive art. Before we agree on what to build, we need a believable answer for how anyone is going to land on it.
For most small businesses, it's some mix of: word-of-mouth and direct, local search ("near me"), Google Maps, social, and existing customer email. The mix changes what the site needs to be good at. A site that lives or dies on local search needs serious SEO foundations and a Google Business Profile that does some of the work for it.
4. What happens after they land?
Pick one action that matters more than every other action on the site. Phone call. Form submission. Booking. Purchase. Newsletter sign-up. Quote request.
If you can't pick one, you'll end up with a homepage that asks visitors to do six things and they'll do none of them. Pick one, design every page so it's the obvious next step, and let the others be polite secondaries.
5. Who's going to keep this thing alive?
Websites aren't furniture. They're more like gardens - they need someone, occasionally, to do something. Add a new product, write a post, fix a broken link, replace last year's photos.
If the answer to "who's going to keep it alive" is "nobody, really," we'll either build something extremely simple that doesn't need updating, or we'll bake a hosting-and-care plan into the quote. What we won't do is build you something complicated and then watch it slowly rot.
That's the brief, really.
Five questions, twenty minutes, and the shape of the project is usually clear. The rest of the discovery call is just confirming detail.
If you're thinking about a new site - or about replacing one that isn't earning its keep - those are the questions worth answering before you ask anyone for a quote.
Want a hand with that? Drop us a line.