Turn the creative brief into a page list

"How many pages do you want?"

It sounds like a sensible question. It is the worst one you can open with, and it is how most small business websites go wrong before a single thing is built.

The client has no idea how many pages they want. So they guess at a number that sounds serious — usually about ten — and now you are building a Team page for a business with two staff, a Gallery nobody will update, and a Blog that will carry three posts and then stop. Meanwhile the one page that would have actually made them money does not exist, because nobody asked what the site was for.

You already have the answer. It is in the creative brief you wrote in the Branding course. This lesson turns that brief into a page list, which is a completely different exercise from picking a number.

Words in this lesson

Ask about jobs, not pages

A website is not a number of pages. It is a set of jobs, and pages are just where those jobs get done.

So the question is not "how many pages?" It is:

"What do you want somebody to be able to do, and what do you need to be able to tell them?"

For most small businesses the honest answer is short:

Five jobs. Not ten pages.

Where the brief already answers this

Open the creative brief from brand discovery. It contains, on one page:

• Who it is for — the target customer from Branding 3.3
• What it promises — the positioning from 3.4
• How it sounds — the brand voice from 4.4

Each of these tells you something about the site:

That last one is the most valuable and the most skipped. The client questionnaire from Branding 3.1 uncovered their customers' fears. Those fears are the reason people leave a website without calling. A page that answers one of them out loud is worth more than three pages of description.

If the brief does not tell you these things, the brief is not finished — and that is a Branding problem to solve before you open WordPress, not something to paper over with extra pages.

The honest small business site

Most of the businesses you will build for need four to six pages:

That is it. A tailor, a barber, a school, a caterer, a small clinic: four to six pages, done properly, beats twelve done thinly every time.

The blog trap

Clients ask for a blog because they have been told to have one. Then nobody writes, and eighteen months later the site's newest post is from the month it launched — which tells every visitor the business has lost interest in itself.

An empty blog is worse than no blog. Ask one question: "who is going to write these, and how often?" If the answer is vague, do not build it. You can add it later in ten minutes if they ever start writing.

The page that actually earns

For almost every small business, one page does most of the work — the one with what they offer and what it costs.

It is also the page clients most want to leave vague, because naming a price feels risky. Push back gently, with the reason from their own side: every enquiry that arrives without a price expectation is a phone call the owner has to take, and most of those calls end in nothing. A price, or even a range, filters out the wrong people before they cost anybody time.

Content is the thing that delays the job

Here is the part that will surprise you the first time.

You will finish building before the client sends their content. Every time. The photos, the service list, the prices, the About text — these sit with the client, and they are busy running a business.

So make it explicit from the start with a content inventory: a simple list of every piece of text and image, who provides it, and by when.

Two things this buys you:

1. When the project stalls, you can show exactly what is missing and whose it is. Without it, a delay caused by missing photos becomes "the designer is slow".
2. It stops the site launching with placeholder text, which is how "Lorem ipsum" ends up on a real business's live About page.

Common mistakes

The short version

• Do not ask how many pages. Ask what a visitor should be able to do, and what the business needs to tell them.
• The creative brief already answers it — who it's for, what it promises, and the fears discovery uncovered.
• Most small businesses need four to six pages, done properly.
• An empty blog is worse than no blog. Ask who will write it before building it.
• The page with what they offer and what it costs is the one that earns. Fight gently for real prices.
• Content is what delays the job. A content inventory names what is missing and whose it is.
• Extra pages are extra things to go stale. More is not more.

Try it yourself

Take the business you have been working with and produce two documents. Do not open WordPress.

1. The page list. For each page, write one line: "This page exists so that a visitor can ______." If you cannot finish that sentence without waffling, the page should not exist. Aim for four to six. If you have more, justify each extra one in the same single sentence.

2. The content inventory, in the four-column table above. Fill in every row. Where the content came from your Branding work — the About text from 4.5, the tagline from 4.3 — write that in the "who provides" column, because it already exists and you should not be writing it twice.

Then find, in your discovery notes, one fear a customer of this business has — a real one, in their words. Write which page will answer it, and the sentence that does the answering.

That sentence will probably be the most valuable thing on the whole website, and it came from a conversation, not from WordPress.

You'll know you've got it when you can name every page on your list and say, in one sentence each, what a visitor can do there — and when you can say out loud why you are not building a blog.