Decide what to say before anyone designs a page

Nobody ever comes to me and says, “I need help figuring out what to say.”

They say they need a website. A landing page. A new sales deck. Something you can see, click, and put on an invoice.

That makes sense. You can explain a website to your CFO or your board. “We hired someone to redo the website” is an easy sentence to say. “We hired someone to figure out our messaging” makes a room go quiet.

Because nobody asks for it, few people offer it. Agencies assume clients won’t pay for it, so they go straight to pages and layouts, and you end up with something that looks good and says nothing.

Every word on every page comes from a decision about what to say. That decision always gets made. Usually it gets made badly, in a quick call where someone says, “Let’s keep it simple and say we’re the best at what we do.” By the time a designer shows up, it’s already settled.

Better questions sound like this. Instead of “What pages do you need?” ask, “What do you want someone to feel after reading this?” Instead of “What’s your timeline?” ask, “What do you want to say that you’ve never been able to say right?”

Some people just want the website, and that’s fine. But if nobody has ever asked you those questions, answering them is the work to do before anyone designs a page.