Post Summary: The Questions Should Come From the Person You Hired
Working out which parts of a business matter for a website is the expertise being paid for. A blank document hands that back, and a doctor doesn’t pass over a clipboard for a self-diagnosis.
A conversation gets more of it, faster. Whoever knows which questions matter is the one asking them, and answers given aloud come out fuller than answers typed. If a written brief is useful afterward, it gets written up from the call by whoever knows what to keep.
Below: what a useful set of notes looks like if you do want to send something ahead, and why the details keep arriving long after any single document is finished.
A Creative Brief Sitting in Your Inbox, Due Back by Friday
Your web company just sent you a creative brief template. Maybe it’s a Google Doc with fifteen fields. Maybe it’s a PDF with a cover page that says “Brand Discovery Worksheet.” Either way, it’s sitting in your inbox, and they’d like it back by Friday so they can get started.
Here’s the question nobody asks out loud: why are you doing this?
You’re the client. You’re paying. And somehow the first thing on your to-do list is a homework assignment from the people you hired to build your website. That’s not how professional services work. Your doctor doesn’t hand you a clipboard and ask you to write your own diagnosis. Your contractor doesn’t ask you to draft the blueprints. The person with the expertise leads the discovery. The professional builds the brief.
We don’t do briefs at Yeet Websites. We do something that works better.
Why the Questions Come From Us
A blank document asks a business owner to work out, on their own, which parts of their business matter for a website. That’s a genuinely hard question, and it’s hard for a specific reason: knowing which details matter is the expertise you were hiring in the first place.
There’s a practical cost too. A document that has to be composed sits there. It waits for an evening that doesn’t come, and the build waits with it. What eventually gets sent back is usually written in a hurry, because it was written under obligation rather than while thinking.
An interview reverses all of that. The questions come from the side that knows which ones open something up, and the answers come out while someone is talking rather than typing. It’s faster, it goes deeper, and it doesn’t require anyone to already know what’s important about their own business from a web design perspective. That’s our job to figure out.
Where the Brief Comes From Here
We don’t do the brief here. We don’t, we don’t do it. We interview the client. We ask questions about their business and get just enough information to build the website they need.
And we want to be candid about something: for $130 a month, a certain kind of deep dive isn’t appropriate. That’s a different price point. Our SEO clients get a more intensive discovery process, that’s a different animal altogether. But for a subscription website build, what we produce is the result of a focused conversation, not a 40-question brand audit. What we put into it is frankly good enough. If it’s not, you tell us, and we’ll adjust accordingly.
The professional has to spearhead the discovery. That’s not a philosophy statement, it’s just how competent work functions. A business owner sitting down to articulate their brand positioning, target audience, competitive differentiators, and content strategy in writing, for a web company they just met, is being asked to do something legitimately hard. And a document written under time pressure becomes the reference point for everything after it. Whatever got left out of a rushed two-pager is simply absent from the build.
We’d rather own the discovery and own the result.
What Happens When a Business Owner Does Write the Brief
Here’s the honest answer: a business owner has never written their own brief and handed it to us. It just doesn’t happen.
But if it did? I think it would be awesome.
Not because it would be polished. It wouldn’t be. It would be messy and rambling and probably missing half of what we’d need. But inside that mess there would be nuggets, four or five moments in a two or three page document where something specific surfaces that we’d want to grab and pull on. “Okay, you said this on page one, middle of the second paragraph, what did you mean by that?” Those are the moments where the magic lives.
The technique that produces something like this isn’t a brief at all. It’s stream of consciousness writing, getting all the ideas out without worrying about punctuation, grammar, or even names. Kafka did this. In The Castle, the main character is just K, never given a full name, because Kafka didn’t want to stop mid-flow to think one up. He probably wrote sections of that book in a single sitting. (Awesome read, by the way, if you’re into Kafka.) The name wasn’t the point. Getting the ideas out was the point.
That’s what a useful business owner “brief” would look like, a stream of consciousness document full of unpolished specifics that a skilled interviewer could mine. Not a formatted brand worksheet. If your web company wanted that, they should’ve asked for that. And then they should’ve done the mining themselves.
What the Conversation Becomes
When we talk about building a website from “a single conversation,” we don’t mean a 30-minute intake call. The single conversation is everything from the first time we talk all the way through to when you pay. That might be three or four exchanges over a week. It’s the period where we get to know each other, where the guard comes down and you start talking about who you are, not just what you sell.
That’s where the website lives and breathes.
The more expansive that conversation is, the more the finished site will have room to breathe and thrive. A website built from a rushed brief and two emails looks like a website built from a rushed brief and two emails. A website built from a real back-and-forth, where we asked the uncomfortable question about why you’re different, and you answered it, looks like something that belongs to your business specifically.
That’s what asking the right questions first is for. A document is a snapshot. The site comes out of everything said after it. And if you’re evaluating whether a web company is worth trusting with your business in the first place, how they handle discovery is one of the clearest signals you’ll get.
What to Ask For Instead
If a brief lands in your inbox and writing it isn’t appealing, there’s a simple request that usually works:
“Can we do this as a call instead?”
Eight words, and most of what a brief was going to collect comes out in twenty minutes of conversation. Everything you know is already in your head. It just comes out more easily in answers than in prose.
If a document is genuinely needed afterward, it can be written up from that call by the person who knows what to keep. That’s the order that works: talk first, write second, and the writing goes to whoever does it for a living.
Discovery is collaborative at minimum, and the side being paid should be driving it. You hired a professional. The professional should lead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to write a creative brief before my web designer can start?
Not with us. A creative brief is something the builder creates from a real conversation, not a document the client fills out. If a web company is asking you to write your own brief, they’re asking you to do discovery work that should be their job. We interview our clients and build the brief from what we learn.
What does the conversation cover that a brief would?
Some companies use briefs as a way to shift discovery work onto the client. The brief sits in someone’s inbox for two weeks, the company uses the delay as cover, and whatever the client eventually sends back becomes the source material, and the shield if something doesn’t come out right. A professional interview produces better information faster and keeps the responsibility where it belongs: with the builder.
What does Yeet Websites use instead of a creative brief?
Conversation, running from the first hello through to launch. What we need gets gathered by asking, about your business, your customers, your competitors, and what makes you different. That conversation is where the website comes from. No forms, no worksheets, no homework for you.
What if I want to send notes or ideas to my web designer before the build starts?
Send them. The best version of this is stream of consciousness, unpolished, unpunctuated, just getting your ideas out without worrying about format. Those messy documents are full of specific details we can mine. The worst version is a formal brief you spent hours writing, structured the way you think a brief should look. We’d rather have your raw thoughts than your cleaned-up presentation.
What if I’d rather talk it through than write it up?
Ask them: “What do you mean?” Let them explain what they need and why. If they can articulate a specific purpose, information that requires your input before they can make any decisions, that’s reasonable. If the explanation is a lengthy case for why briefs help the process, you’ve learned something about how this company operates. The professional should be leading discovery, not delegating it.
What makes a website build successful if there’s no formal brief?
The quality of the conversation. Honest answers to good questions beat a formal document every time. The brief is a document. The conversation is where the site comes from. The more expansive and honest that conversation is, the more the finished site will reflect your business specifically.
If you’re being asked to fill out a brief right now, you don’t have to. Here’s what starting a project should look like, and if you’ve ever felt like your web designer just didn’t get your business, here’s why that happens and what the alternative looks like.