What to send your web designer before the first call

1. The one thing you want the site to do

Not three things. One. Ring you, book an appointment, request a quote, order something, join a list.

This sounds obvious and it is the single most useful sentence you can give a designer, because every subsequent decision follows from it. A site built to produce phone calls looks different from one built to take bookings, and a site trying to do four things equally well does none of them.

If you genuinely cannot choose, pick the one that would hurt most to lose.

2. Two or three websites you like

They do not need to be in your industry — it is often better if they are not, since you will be looking at the design rather than copying a competitor. And you do not need to explain why in design language. “I like how simple this is” or “this one feels expensive” is plenty.

Send one you actively dislike too. Knowing what to avoid saves at least one round of revisions.

3. Who you want more of — and less of

The first half everyone answers. The second half is the useful one and almost nobody volunteers it.

The job you would rather stop taking shapes a website more than any other piece of information. A garage that wants diagnostic work rather than tyre swaps, a builder who wants extensions rather than small repairs, an accountant who wants limited companies rather than one-off tax returns — each needs different pages, different prices on display and different copy.

A website can filter as well as attract, and that is usually worth more than extra volume.

4. Whatever you already have, however messy

Logo files if you have them, in the largest or most original format you can find. Photographs. Any text from the current site, a brochure or your Facebook page. Price lists. Your accreditations and memberships.

Do not tidy it first. A folder of unsorted phone photographs is more useful than nothing, and the designer will tell you which are usable. Waiting until you have organised it is how projects lose two months.

If you have no decent photographs of your own work, say so early. For trades and salons especially, photographs are the product, and it is better to plan for that at the start than to discover it at the end.

5. Where your work comes from now

Honestly, in rough proportions. Recommendation, Checkatrade, Facebook, a directory, Google, repeat customers, a single large client.

This stops a designer solving the wrong problem. If nearly all your work is recommendation, the site’s main job is converting people who are looking you up by name, and that is a different build from one chasing searches you do not currently appear for.

6. Your deadline, and whether it is real

“As soon as possible” is not a deadline. A trade show in March, a lease starting in June, a season that begins in April — those are deadlines, and they change what is sensible to attempt.

If there is no real date, say that too. It is genuinely useful, and it usually produces a better website than an invented rush.

The question nobody asks

Ask who will be writing the words.

It is the most common reason small website projects die. The design is approved in week two, and then everything waits for the business owner to write eight pages of copy in evenings they do not have. Six months later there is a finished design and no website.

So establish it at the start: is copywriting included, are you writing it, or is it a mixture? If it is you, be realistic about when, and consider paying for it instead — it is usually the best-value line on the quote. For what it is worth, copywriting is included from our Business plan upwards, and the Starter plan assumes a conversation rather than a document from you.

What you do not need

Three things people spend weeks on unnecessarily:

• A written specification. Unless the project is genuinely complex, a conversation is better. Specifications written by people who do not build websites tend to over-specify the easy parts and miss the hard ones.
• Finished copy for every page. See above. Send what exists.
• A sitemap or page list. Reasonable to have an opinion, but the structure should come out of what you want the site to do and what people search for. Deciding it first often locks in the wrong shape.

If you are speaking to us

None of this is required. Our enquiry form asks for very little deliberately, and the twenty-minute call is where we work most of it out. But if you arrive with the first and third items above — the one action, and who you want more and less of — the first reply will be far more useful than a request for more information.