Thirty minutes, one call, and a scope you can price with confidence. These are the questions I ask every prospective client, and why each one matters.
Every website project I have regretted started with a call where I did most of the talking. Every project that went smoothly started with one where the client did. Over time I turned the questions that matter into a discovery call checklist I run through on every call. Here it is, in the order I usually ask.
The business
What do you sell, and to whom? Not the tagline, the real answer. A landscaping firm that mostly does commercial contracts needs a very different site from one chasing homeowners.
How do customers find you today? Referrals, Google, Instagram, a marketplace. This tells me where the website sits in their funnel and how much SEO groundwork is going to matter.
What would a good year look like, and what part of that is the website supposed to carry? This is the question that turns a vague “we need a new site” into a target: more enquiries, fewer support emails, online bookings without phone calls.
The current situation
Is there an existing site? What is wrong with it? I ask them to be specific. “It looks dated” is a design job. “People can’t find our prices” is a structure job. “It takes eight seconds to load” is a rebuild.
Who updates it now, and how often? If nobody has touched it in two years, the new site needs to be simple enough that they will. If they publish weekly, the editing experience becomes a priority.
Where is it hosted, and who owns the domain? You would be surprised how often the answer is “our old developer, I think”. Sorting this out early avoids a nasty week before launch.
The content
Do you have the words and pictures, or do we need a plan for them? Content is the number one reason website projects run late. If it does not exist yet, I say so plainly and we build the timeline around getting it, or I quote copywriting separately.
Are there brand guidelines, a logo, colours, fonts? A yes means design moves faster. A no means I add a small brand-basics step before layout work starts.
The scope
Roughly how many pages, and which ones are genuinely different? Ten pages that share three layouts is a small site. Ten unique layouts is not.
Anything beyond pages? Bookings, a shop, member areas, forms that feed a CRM, more than one language, integrations with tools they already use. Each of these is a line in the quote.
Is there a hard date? An event, a season, a launch. If yes, I work backwards from it and tell them honestly whether it is achievable with the content they have.
The decision
Who signs things off? One person is ideal. A committee is fine as long as we know it is a committee and build review time in.
Do you have a budget range in mind? People sometimes dodge this, so I offer my own starting points first. It is much kinder to find out on the call that we are far apart than after a proposal.
What happens after launch? Will they maintain it, or would a care plan suit them better? Asking now means the handover is designed in, not bolted on.
What I do with the answers
Within a day or two the client gets a written scope: pages and features, what I need from them and when, what is excluded, a fixed price and a start date. Almost everything in that document is a direct answer to a question above. That is the whole point of the checklist. The call is not a sales pitch; it is the first piece of work on the project.
