Most of what a website will cost — in money, time and regret — is decided before anyone opens a design tool. Not by the designer, and not by the technology. By the quality of the thinking that goes in first.
The good news is that the thinking is free, and you can do a lot of it yourself. If you can answer the seven questions below before you brief a web designer, you’ll write a better brief, get more useful quotes, and end up with a site that does a job rather than one that merely exists. If you can’t answer them yet, that’s fine too — it just tells you where the first conversation needs to start.
1. What does this website actually need to achieve?
“A new website” is not a goal. It’s a thing. The goal is what you want the thing to do: book more consultations, generate qualified enquiries, sell a product, reduce the number of “how do I…” phone calls your team fields every day.
Be specific, and pick a primary goal. A website that’s trying to do eight things equally well usually does all of them badly. If you can finish the sentence “this website is a success if it…” in one line, you’ve done more strategic work than most projects manage before launch.
2. Who is it really for?
Not “everyone”. The most useful thing you can bring to a web project is a clear picture of the one or two people who matter most: the finance director comparing three suppliers, the homeowner ringing round for a quote at 9pm, the HR manager who needs to trust you before they’ll shortlist you.
Different visitors need different things, and they don’t all decide the same way. When you know who you’re really building for, a hundred smaller decisions — tone, structure, what goes above the fold — start answering themselves.
3. What’s actually going wrong right now?
This is the question most briefs skip, and it’s the most important one. “The site looks dated” is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Is the problem that people can’t find what they need? That they find it but don’t trust it? That they trust it but there’s no obvious next step? Each of those points to a completely different fix — and only one of them is a redesign.
Your analytics and your own inbox already hold clues. Where do people leave? What do they ring and ask that the website should have answered? A redesign that doesn’t name the real problem is just a more expensive version of the same one. This is exactly the kind of thing we work through before designing anything.
The one to answer first
If you only settle one question before you brief anyone, make it this one. Almost every wasted web budget traces back to a project that solved a problem the business didn’t actually have.
4. How will you know it worked?
Decide, up front, what you’ll measure and what “better” looks like in numbers. More enquiries? Better-quality ones? More online bookings, fewer support calls, a shorter sales cycle?
Agreeing this before launch does two useful things. It keeps everyone honest about whether the site is doing its job, and it stops the project being judged on taste — on whether a stakeholder personally likes the shade of blue — instead of on results. Make sure basic analytics are in place from day one so you’re not guessing later.
5. Who’s going to write the content — and is it ready?
Content is where more web projects stall than any other single reason. The design is signed off, the build is ready, and then everything waits three months for the copy nobody was assigned to write.
Be honest before you start: do you have the words, the photography and the case studies, or does someone need to create them? Who is that someone, and do they have the time? Good content isn’t decoration you add at the end — it’s most of what a visitor actually came for, and it shapes the design rather than filling it.
6. What happens after someone’s convinced?
Picture your ideal visitor, persuaded, ready to act. What do they do next — and how easy have you made it? A phone number they have to hunt for, a contact form that asks for their life story, a “request a callback” that takes two days: each of these quietly loses the people you worked hardest to win.
Map the path from “interested” to “in touch” and remove every step that doesn’t need to be there. The single most valuable improvement to many websites isn’t a redesign — it’s making the next step obvious and effortless.
7. Who owns and runs it after launch?
A website is not a project you finish; it’s an asset you run. Before you build, decide who will keep it updated, who holds the logins and the domain, and how easy it needs to be for a non-technical colleague to change a price or add a page.
This is also where two quieter questions belong: accessibility and performance. A site that’s slow or unusable for people with disabilities isn’t just a poor experience — it excludes real customers, and in many contexts it’s a legal expectation. It’s worth understanding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Google’s guidance on Core Web Vitals at a high level, so you can ask whether your new site will actually meet them. Insist on owning the code and content outright, so you’re never held hostage by the people who built it.
Answer these, and the brief writes itself
You’ll notice none of these seven questions mention a single feature. No sliders, no booking systems, no page counts, no CMS. That’s deliberate. Features are answers — and until you’ve asked the questions, you’ve no way of knowing which answers you actually need.
Work through them and you’ll brief better, spend smarter, and be far harder to sell something you don’t need. And if you’d rather talk them through with someone whose job is asking exactly these questions, that’s what we do — it’s the whole idea behind the name.