What kind of site do you need? Seven questions
You want a site. You open an AI, you type "build me a site for my business", and you get something correct that does not fit. You cannot say why. You rephrase, you start again, and after three evenings you give up on the whole thing.
Three answers settle it: does anyone need an account, does money change hands, and does the content change often. No account and no payment means a brochure site. Payment means a store. Accounts mean an application, roughly five times the work. And sometimes a contact page is enough.
The problem is not the tool. It is that you asked it to choose, on your behalf, things only you can decide — and you had not decided them, because nobody ever asked you the right questions.
What everyone tells you, and why it does not help
Search for “what kind of website should I choose” and you land on the same page everywhere: a table comparing the brochure site, the blog and the store. It is accurate, and it is unusable. Those pages describe abstract categories and leave you to work out which one you fall into. They are also written almost entirely by agencies, whose business is selling you the most expensive category.
Search for “build a website with AI” and you land on tool rankings. You still do not know what to build, but you now know which tool not to know it with.
The step before is missing. The one where nobody asks which site you want — you do not know, that is the whole problem — but where you get asked about things you already know: your business, your customers, what you are losing today.
The three questions that settle almost everything
Of the seven that frame a project, three are enough to determine its nature. They look like nothing and they commit months of work.
Does anyone need to be recognised from one visit to the next? Put plainly: is there a login. This is what separates a site from an application, and it multiplies the work by five. It is also the only one of the three you cannot fix afterwards.
Does money change hands on the screen? If so, you are not building a site, you are opening a shop: terms of sale, refunds, taxes, disputes. The legal side will weigh as much as the technical one.
Does what is displayed change often? Once a year, once a week or constantly: three radically different projects, with three different ways of running them.
Cross the three answers and the type comes out on its own.
| Account | Money | Changes | It is |
|---|---|---|---|
| no | no | rarely | a brochure site |
| no | no | often | a content site |
| no | yes | — | an online store |
| yes | no | — | an application |
| yes | yes | — | a subscription service |
The other four questions are not there to pick the type. They are there to size it: what your project must contain, what it must never contain, and which end to start from.
The question nobody asks
It happens regularly that the answers describe a need which a contact page, a well-kept business profile or a shared spreadsheet solves entirely.
In that case, the right answer is: build nothing.
You will not read that anywhere else, and it makes sense — an agency has no reason to save you a month of work, and a tool comparison site is paid per click. Ask yourself the question anyway before you start, because afterwards you will have a site to maintain forever.
What a site must contain, and what it must not
Once the type is known, the composition comes down to three lists.
There is what shows: the pages, in the order a visitor needs them. For most businesses, four is enough.
There is what does not show, which accounts for most of the gap between an amateur result and a professional one. Speed away from wifi. Addresses that stay put once published. Something useful behind a wrong address. Pictures that make sense to a screen reader. The legal pages. A copy of everything, somewhere safe. Beginners skip all of it, and every one of them gets noticed the day it is absent.
And there is what you must leave out, the list nobody writes: sliding banners, welcome pop-ups, a team page for a team of one, a blog that will go stale by March. Each addition is one more thing to write, review and repair for years.
And then: building in the right order
Once you know what to build, the order remains — and that is where most projects are lost.
The universal mistake is launching every page at once. You end up with eight half-finished pages, none of which works, nobody knows where to pick up, and that is the exact moment people give up. The opposite method fits in one sentence: finish one single page completely, right down to the form that genuinely sends a message you genuinely receive, before starting a second.
The looks come last. An ugly result that works can be made handsome in an evening; a handsome result that does not work gets thrown away.
What exists to save you all this
Asking the seven questions, deriving the composition, writing the plan and starting the build: it can be done by hand, and this article gives you enough to begin.
It can also happen on its own. The full frame contains a file you hand to your AI, which makes it run the interview for you: it asks the seven questions one at a time, works out what you are building, tells you what your project must contain — including what you did not ask about — writes the plan into your project so it survives closing the window, and carries straight on to the first page. Nothing to fill in, nothing to remember.
It also holds the exact messages to send next, in order, with what you should get back each time and the sign that things are going wrong.
If you would rather see the method at work without spending anything, the free kit puts the basic frame in place in fifteen minutes.
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