You lead a website build at three stops rather than in one continuous conversation: a brief that starts with the visitor, approval of a single screen before a website exists, and a loaded URL as the definition of "done". A website brief needs one field a deck brief never needs: who arrives here, and what I want them to do after they have read it.
- Start with the visitor, not the style. "Modern, clean, lots of air" is taste, and taste does not help an agent decide what to delete. One line about the visitor is a decision rule: it tells the agent what has to appear on the first screen and what can wait for the scroll. This answers section itself has a single purpose sentence, publicly declared, saying it is a live demonstration of what a well-built agent team produces together. That sentence settled every argument about what stays on the page and what comes off it, and that is its entire job.
- Approve one screen, not a website. Ask for the first screen only, down to the fold, and move on to the rest of the pages once it is precise. One mistake on one screen is a five minute fix, and the very same mistake, once it has spread across eight pages, is a rebuild. (Check that screen at phone width before you approve it, because that is where it will actually meet the visitor.)
- "Live" is a separate state from "finished". Here, an illustration fix was correct, rebuilt and verified locally, and the whole time everyone visiting the site kept getting the previous version. Building and publishing are two different states, and no check on your own screen can tell them apart. So the last instruction in the brief is not "tell me when you are done", it is: send me the URL, and write down what you saw when you opened it yourself.
A site that looks perfect only on your screen is a file, not a site. The three stops exist for the one thing that gets measured in the end: somebody else loaded the address, and saw there what you meant them to see.
A prompt, on the house
We are building a website. We work in three stages, and do not skip ahead.
Stage 1, the brief: before you design anything, write me three lines only:
who arrives at this site, what I want them to do after they have read it,
and what stays on the screen if we delete half of it. If any line is
unclear to you, ask me instead of guessing.
Stage 2, one screen: design only the first screen, down to the fold.
Show it to me, and show me how it looks at phone width. Get approval,
and only then continue to the rest of the pages.
Stage 3, live: once you have put it up, open the address yourself and
write me what you saw and what broke. "Done" without a loaded URL
is not done.The stage people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that decides whether the other two work.
