Website projects go wrong in a predictable place, and it is earlier than most people think.
It is not the design. It is not the build. It is the moment somebody starts writing pages without an agreed answer to what the business does, who it does it for, and where.
Without that answer, every page becomes a small negotiation. Copy comes back wrong, gets rewritten, comes back wrong differently. Two rounds in, everybody is frustrated and nobody can say exactly what was supposed to be there.
The fix costs about an hour and it happens before anybody is hired.
Marque & Heir asks for this before a build starts, and recommends writing it whether or not you hire anyone.
What the document is
One page. Plain sentences. No formatting, no polish. Not something anybody publishes, which is what makes it honest.
Six sections, and they can each be a paragraph or a list.
One: what you do, in the words a customer would use
Write down the work you do, using the words a customer would use to describe it, not the words the trade uses.
If there is a gap between those two vocabularies, that gap is the most valuable finding in the exercise. It is where searches get missed and where pages fail to connect.
Include the work you actually want. Leave out things you technically can do but would rather not.
Two: who it is for
Describe the customer. Homeowners, businesses, both. New builds or existing properties. One-off jobs or ongoing work. Anybody you specifically do not serve.
Be specific about who you are not for. That is more useful than it sounds, because it decides what the site should stop attracting.
Three: where
The real service area, written honestly. How far you drive for a normal job. Whether there is a further boundary for bigger work. Where the hard no is.
If the answer is different for different services, write it out for each one.
Four: what makes a job go well or badly
This is the section owners find easiest and skip most often.
What does a good customer for you look like? What does a job look like when it goes smoothly? What is the situation that always turns into a problem?
Everything the site should be filtering for, or filtering out, is in this section.
Five: what you actually want the website to do
Be concrete. More calls of a certain type. Fewer calls of another type. Fewer basic questions. A place to send people who ask what you do. Somewhere to show finished work.
"More business" is not an answer that can be built toward. The specific version is.
Six: what has to be true
Constraints and facts. What you will and will not publish. Whether prices appear. Whether names and faces appear. Anything about licensing, insurance, or accreditation that has to be stated correctly. Any wording you have been advised to use or avoid.
Also: who has to approve what before it goes live, and who has the final word. Settling that in advance saves the argument.
What to do with it
If you are hiring somebody, give it to them before they quote. A quote produced against a clear brief is a quote you can hold somebody to. A quote produced against a vague one is a starting position.
If you are building it yourself, use it as the outline. Nearly every page you need is implied by those six sections.
If you are not doing either yet, keep it. It stays true, and it is the fastest way to bring somebody up to speed later.
Do not fill in what you do not know
Where you genuinely do not have an answer, write that you do not have one.
An invented answer in this document becomes a page on the website within a month, and by then nobody remembers it was a guess. Written down as unknown, it stays a question, and questions get resolved.
What this is not
This is not a strategy document and it is not a plan. It is a record of what is true, written before anybody starts building on top of it.
Almost every expensive rewrite we see traces back to this hour not being spent.
If you want an outside read on what your current site says compared to what you would write in this document, the free check covers your website, your Google profile, your search results, and your reviews. Nothing is logged into or changed, and the findings are yours to keep.