The decisions behind a website built from your words

Sitewright is not built yet, so there is nothing here to sign up for. The waitlist on the home page is the only thing that is open. What I can show you is the short list of decisions being made while it gets built, because each one is really a decision about the website you are planning. None of them are working features. They are the shape being aimed at, and most of them you can act on tonight with a notebook.

Your description is the interface

The decision I keep coming back to: no canvas of boxes to drag, and no settings panel to learn. You write what the site is for, in sentences, and the layout is worked out from what you wrote.

That puts the weight on one sentence only you can write. "Cakes" gives a tool almost nothing to work with. "Celebration cakes for birthdays and weddings, north side of town, orders by Thursday" gives it a heading, an area, a limit and a next step. The clearer that sentence, the less you correct afterwards.

One page before five

Most small businesses need a single page that answers the questions a stranger asks before spending money: what you do, where you are, when you are open, what it costs, how to start.

Split that across five pages before you have written anything and you get five thin pages instead of one useful one. A second page earns its place when it answers a question people already search for by name, in the words they use. There is a section-by-section walkthrough of what belongs on that first page in what to put on a small business website, and it is worth writing before you decide how the site gets made.

A site that is not finished on launch day

We are designing for the version of your site that exists three months after launch, not the one that goes live on the first day. The page you launch with should be the page you could write this month, with room for another to slot in later without a redesign or a new address.

In practice, that means keeping a note file of the questions customers ask you. Every real question is a candidate for a page, and the title of that page should be the words the customer used, not the words you would put on a business card.

Change it by saying it

Finding a setting in a control panel is homework, and it is the part people give up on. So the aim is that a change is a sentence: "move the form above the opening hours", "put the price list on its own section", "the phone number is wrong". You describe it, and that is the whole interaction.

It also means being honest about the changes that are not a matter of taste. A price, a phone number, a postcode: those get written exactly as they are and checked by a person, because guessing gets them wrong.

The parts we hand to another service

Some jobs a website cannot do on its own, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with a booking page that quietly loses bookings. A live booking calendar, a shop with a basket, a members' area: each one needs somewhere to keep data and something to check who is allowed to see it.

The answer here is to say that plainly instead of drawing a screen that looks like it works. If you need one of those, choose the service that does it well first, then let your page point at it. Picking it in that order saves you a rebuild later.

The claims we leave out

If a sentence needs a number we cannot point at a source for, it comes out. That is why there is no "twice as fast" and no "thousands of sites built" anywhere on this site: nobody has measured either.

The same rule improves your own page. "Trusted by hundreds" is a claim, and if you cannot point at the hundreds, the line should go. Say what you do, where you do it, and what happens after someone gets in touch. Those three things are true on day one.

What you can do before any of this exists

• One sentence: what you sell, to whom, and roughly where.
• Five facts in one place: opening hours, area covered, price range, how to start, how to cancel.
• Names for the pages you might add later, written the way customers say them out loud.
• The one job you would rather hand to another service, whether that is bookings, payments or logins.
• Anything you would need to check before saying it out loud in a room full of customers.

That list is the part of this project that already exists. The product does not. Sitewright is still being built, nothing is for sale, and there is no date being promised. The waitlist is the only thing that is open, and it is where you will hear when there is something to try: join the waitlist if you want that one email.