What to Prepare Before Building a Website: An Information Checklist Before You Talk to a Web Team

Before an architect draws a single line of a house plan, they sit down with the owner and ask questions. How many people will live here? Is anyone elderly? Who does the cooking, and how often? How many cars? However skilled the architect is, they cannot answer those questions for you, because they are about the life that will happen inside the house, not about concrete or steel.

Building a website works the same way. A web team can plan the pages, design them, write the code and make sure Google can read the site. But there is one set of information no team can guess for you: the things your customers want to know before they feel ready to contact you. Roughly how much does it cost? How long does it take? Have you done a job like mine before? What happens if I am not happy? Those answers live in your head and in your chat history with customers, not with the web team.

Let me say this first: a good web team will help you organise and lay out that information. Ours does. You do not need to write every page before the project starts. This article is not a big homework assignment. It is an invitation to gather the raw material that only you have. When that raw material is ready, the project moves much faster, and the finished site actually answers your customers' questions.

Try this five-minute test first

Before you read on, open your shop's LINE or Messenger chats. Scroll through the last 10 new customers who messaged you, and write down what each person asked in their very first message.

Most lists look similar. How much is it? Do you cover my area? How many days will it take? Can I see photos of past work? Do I need to pay a deposit?

The list you just wrote is the heart of your information checklist. Every question a customer has to type out is a question your website should already have answered. And the people who asked are the lucky ones, because many more visitors have the same questions and simply close the page instead of typing. This article takes you one step further: preparing those answers so they are ready to hand to your web team.

The checklist: 10 groups of information to prepare yourself

I have grouped everything by the questions customers are silently asking. You do not need polished writing. Short notes on your phone or in a Google Doc are enough, and the web team will shape them into proper copy.

1. "What do you do, for whom, and where?"

Write one sentence that says what you do, which customers you serve and which area you cover. For example: "Home air-conditioner cleaning and repair in Nonthaburi and Pathum Thani." That alone tells a visitor straight away whether they are in the right place. If there are areas you do not cover or customers you do not take on, note those too. It filters out mismatches early, so neither side wastes time.

2. "What exactly do I get with this service?"

Go service by service. Note what each one includes, what it does not include, how long it takes, and what the customer needs to prepare on their side. The part people most often forget is "what is not included", which is exactly what causes the most friction at handover. When customers know it from the website, the first conversation becomes much easier.

3. "Roughly how much will it cost?"

This is the one owners hesitate over most, because every job is priced differently. I understand. But look at this research first. Nielsen Norman Group, a web usability research firm, wrote in State the Price to Give B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage (Hoa Loranger, December 2013) that business customers name pricing as the information they need most online. In their tests with real users, people who could not find a price went to a competitor's site instead, and most users preferred to find information on their own rather than talk to a salesperson.

To be fair, that study looked at B2B customers and was written years ago, so it is not data about Thai customers specifically. But if you look back at the questions you just collected from your chats, I would guess "price" is near the top of your list too.

The good news is that you do not need a fixed price. The same article recommends that when exact pricing is unrealistic, you show prices for typical scenarios or a price range instead. So prepare three things: a starting price, two or three common example jobs with what those customers actually paid, and the factors that push the price up or down, such as area size, number of items or travel distance. Also note whether your prices include VAT, if your business is VAT-registered.

Here is an example from our own site. On the TumWebSME website packages page we show a price for every package, along with how many pages each one includes and how many months of support come with it. Visitors know before they message us where their budget fits, so when they do get in touch, we can talk about the actual project instead of starting with "how much?"

4. "What happens after I get in touch?"

Write out the steps from the first message to the day the work is delivered. How many steps are there, roughly how long does each take, how much is the deposit, when is the balance due, and how does the customer sign off? First-time customers often worry about this without saying so. Seeing the steps laid out clearly tells them you run a proper process. If your website will also need systems, such as online booking or member accounts, a written requirements document is the next step up, which I explain in What is an SRS? For an ordinary business website, the checklist in this article is enough to start the conversation.

5. "Have you done work like mine before?"

Collect 3 to 6 pieces of real work that match the customers you want more of. For each one, jot down who the customer was (or what type of business, if you cannot name them), what the brief was, how you solved it and what the result was. Before-and-after photos work especially well for service businesses. Phone photos are fine, as long as the light is good and the work is clearly visible. If you want to show a customer's name, logo or face, ask their permission first, every time.

6. "What do previous customers say?"

Gather the reviews you already have, from Google, Facebook or thank-you messages in your chats, and ask each customer whether they are happy for you to use it on your website. A review that describes how the job went carries far more weight than a short "great service".

If you have only a few reviews, the safe way to get more is to ask every customer after each job, not just the ones who seem happy, and never offer a discount or a gift in exchange. Google spells this out in its Google Maps user-generated content policy: businesses must not offer incentives for reviews or selectively ask only customers likely to leave positive ones, but they can encourage customers to post about their genuine experience.

7. "Is this a real business?"

Prepare your registered business name, your address or shopfront (if you have one), the year you started, a photo of the team or of yourself, and any licences or certificates relevant to your work. These look like small details, but for someone who has never met you, they are proof that real people stand behind the website. If you want to know what Thai buyers check before they are willing to transfer money, I wrote about it in Why Are Thai Buyers Afraid to Transfer Money to an Unknown Facebook Page?

8. "How do I reach you, and how fast will you reply?"

List every contact channel you actually use, which one gets the fastest reply, your working days and hours, and how quickly you usually answer chats. Leave out any channel nobody monitors any more. An inbox nobody opens or a number nobody answers does more damage than not listing that channel at all.

9. "What if something goes wrong?"

These are the terms people ask about just before they decide: how long the work is guaranteed for, whether they can cancel, how refunds work, and which payment methods you accept. They do not need long explanations, but they do need to be clear. If your terms are already on your quotation, simply send that to the web team.

10. Files and accounts the web team will ask for

This last group does not come from customer questions. It is what web teams ask for on almost every project, and it often stalls the work when nobody can find it: a high-resolution logo file (the original AI, SVG or PDF file from your designer is best), the colours or fonts you use regularly, and links to your Facebook page, LINE OA and Google Business Profile.

If you have registered a website domain before or already have an old site, find out which provider it is registered with, which email address was used and who holds the login. This comes up a lot: the domain was registered in the name of whoever built a site years ago, and nobody can reach them any more. The sooner you know, the more time there is to fix it. One important point: do not send passwords to anyone over chat. You only need to know where the account is and who can access it. When it is time to move or connect the domain, the team will show you a safe way to do it.

Example: from a chat reply to website content

To show what raw material looks like, take a made-up example of an air-conditioner cleaning shop. Looking back through the chats, the owner finds they have typed the same pricing answer dozens of times: "Standard clean is 600 per unit. High-mounted units or full strip-down cleaning cost extra. Discount if you book several units."

That message is short, yet it holds almost everything the web team needs: a starting price, the factors that change the price, and a discount condition. All the owner adds to the checklist is to make the rough numbers precise, such as how much extra a strip-down costs, how high counts as high-mounted and how many units earn the discount, plus two real example jobs. One is a condo with two units on a standard clean; the other is a house with four units, one of which needs a strip-down, each with the amount the customer actually paid.

From that note alone, the web team builds an easy-to-read price table, with example cases customers can compare to their own home and a short note on what changes the price. Visitors can estimate their budget straight away, and the owner has not written anything beyond what they had already typed in chat. The numbers in this example are made up for illustration; real prices vary from shop to shop.

What you can leave to the web team

By now this may feel like a lot. So let me show you the other side: there is plenty you do not have to think about at all.

How many pages you need, how the menu is ordered, what goes on the home page and what lives on detail pages, where the contact buttons sit, how small images need to be to load fast, and how the site is set up so Google can read it: all of that is the web team's job.

Arranging the content is the team's job too, and it matters more than most people expect. Putting everything you prepared onto one page does not automatically make the website better. Sometimes it makes the page look so busy that customers back away. I wrote about this in The Website That Explains Too Much. Your job is to prepare complete raw material; deciding what comes first and what sits further down is where the team helps.

Short on time? Start with a 5-item minimum

At this point you might be thinking, "I do not have time to prepare all of this." I get it. Most SME owners already do everything themselves, and filling in another long list sounds exhausting.

But notice that you have already typed almost everything on this list to customers in chat, dozens of times over. Prices, steps, terms, service areas: it is all in your chat history. What you really need to do is copy your best answers into one place. And you do not have to finish every item before you start talking to a web team. If you can only prepare part of it, I recommend these five, in the order customers usually ask.

1. One sentence saying what you do, for whom, and where

2. A starting price, with two common example jobs and what each actually cost

3. Three pieces of real work, each with two or three lines of description

4. Your process from first message to delivery, including the deposit

5. Your fastest contact channel, with your working hours

These five cover most of what people wonder about before they get in touch. When you have more time, add reviews, terms and the details that prove your business is real.

Back to that house

A good architect asks the right questions and helps you think through what you do not know. But a home that is truly comfortable to live in comes from an owner who can answer clearly about their own life. Websites are the same. The web team takes care of structure and design; your prices, your process, your work and the promises you make to customers are things only you know.

Once the site is live, run the five-minute test from the start of this article again. If your new customers' first questions change from "how much is it?" to questions about their specific job, the information you prepared is doing its work for you.

If you have already listed the questions from your chats, or started gathering some of this information, tell the TumWebSME team about it. Send your notes in whatever shape they are in; they do not need to be tidy. We will help you see what is ready, what is still missing, and what kind of website suits your business.