A website plan becomes easier when each page has a clear question to answer. Before choosing colours or layouts, write down what a prospective customer needs to understand before contacting you.

Start with the decision you want to support.

For a consultancy, the visitor might be deciding whether your expertise fits a specific problem. For a design studio, they may want to compare the quality of your work, the scope of a service, and its starting price.

Describe the visitor, the situation that brought them to the site, and the next step you want to make easy. This becomes a useful test for every section you add.

Give each page a job.

  • Home: What do you do, who do you help, and where should I start?
  • Services: What can I hire you for, and what does the work include?
  • Work: What examples help me judge your approach?
  • About: How do you work, and what should I expect from the relationship?
  • Contact: How can I discuss my project, and what happens next?

These are page roles, not a mandatory page count. A focused service can combine several roles on one page. A more complex business may need separate pages for distinct audiences or offers.

A page map for a fictional consultancy

Imagine a consultancy helping leadership teams decide which projects to prioritise. Its homepage could introduce that decision and link to two services: a focused workshop and ongoing advisory support.

The service pages would explain the format, client input, and agreed output. A work page could show an accurately labelled sample prioritisation exercise. The contact page would ask what decision the team is facing, so the enquiry starts with useful context.

This is an illustrative page map. A real brief should use the business’s actual services and approved evidence.

Put evidence beside the claim.

If you say that you design readable carousels, show readable slides. If you describe a responsive website, show how its pages adapt to a narrow screen. A specific example gives the visitor something to assess.

Label self-initiated concepts accurately. They can explain your design thinking without pretending to represent a client engagement.

Make the first draft in plain text.

Write a heading, two or three sentences, and a next step for each page. If the offer is hard to explain in text, more visual effects will not resolve the uncertainty.

Use this draft to agree the structure before detailed design begins. The result is a brief that connects the pages to the customer’s questions.

Use the website project brief to turn your page map into a working plan, or open the editable brief template (plain text) and save a copy.