The brief template I fill in before any AI build

This is the second half of the prompt system — the part that changes for every project. The standard controls quality. This controls whether the result is about this business or about business in general.

It takes about ten minutes to fill in and saves the two hours you would otherwise spend correcting things in follow-up messages.

Why answer it up front

Every question here is one an AI will otherwise answer for you, silently, with an average. Skip the audience question and you get copy aimed at nobody. Skip the "things to avoid" question and you find out what you hate after it is built.

The single highest-value field is the reference sites — not to copy, but because "I like this one" tells you more about someone's taste in five seconds than a paragraph of adjectives.

The template

BUSINESS
1. Name
2. What kind of business
3. Where it is located
4. Who the customer is (be specific: not "everyone")
5. The ONE thing the site must make happen
   (bookings / calls / WhatsApp / quotes / visits / sales)
6. Services or products to present
7. What already exists: logo, photos, copy, domain, socials

BRAND
8. Official brand colours, if any (hex codes)
9. Preferred fonts, if any
10. Pick 2-3: luxury / elegant / modern / premium / minimal / bold /
    energetic / sophisticated / welcoming / artistic / professional /
    high-end / youthful / traditional / technical
11. Colours, styles or elements to avoid

REFERENCES
12. 1-3 sites you like (URLs)
13. What specifically you like about each — layout, type, motion, mood

CONTENT
14. Real copy, photos, menu, pricing, testimonials, FAQs you already have
15. Information that MUST appear: address, hours, phone, WhatsApp,
    booking link, socials, legal pages

CONSTRAINTS
16. Anything that is already decided: stack, host, CMS, budget, deadline

The two fields people get wrong

Question 5. Almost everyone lists four goals. If the site has four primary goals it has none, and the design cannot prioritise anything. Pick the one that matters most commercially and let the rest be secondary.

Question 14. "I'll add the content later" is the most expensive sentence in this document. Layouts built around real content look different from layouts built around placeholder blocks, and retrofitting real text into a design shaped by lorem ipsum is how sites end up with awkward gaps and overflowing headlines.

If you genuinely do not have content yet, say so explicitly — a good standard will leave obvious placeholders rather than invent testimonials, and you will know exactly what is still missing.

Adapting it

Add a question whenever you notice yourself giving the same correction twice. My version has grown a "constraints" block because I kept getting suggestions to add a CMS to sites that did not need one.

Drop questions that do not apply. A personal site does not need question 3.