Ten, for an institution
When the site is for a business, a group, a life's work.
Start at the beginning
Who started this, when, and why — and the story only the family tells? Offer the half-remembered version you've heard; being corrected is how the real history comes out.
Walk me through the full spectrum
Everything you do today, end to end. Not the elevator pitch — the map.
Give me the ground tour
Where does the work actually happen? What does it look like, sound like? Offer a wrong picture — "I'm imagining hundreds of machines…" — and let them paint the right one. That texture becomes the site's copy.
Who are the people?
Who runs it, and how do you divide the work? The answer is usually a leadership section writing itself.
What's the proof?
The customer or moment that changed your credibility — and the numbers behind it. A stringent buyer is a quality story.
What are the hard questions?
The ones a skeptical visitor will ask — safety, sustainability, quality — and your honest answers. Certifications you can publicly display live here.
What do you give back?
And what would you do even if nobody required it? The mandated part is a section; the unmandated part is a story.
Where is this going?
The next few years in concrete terms — capacity, places, plans. Futures make a site feel alive.
What pictures already exist?
Have them list the shots they can actually produce — then design around those as placeholders, not around images that will never arrive.
When a visitor is convinced — what should they do?
Email, call, visit? The one door the whole site points at.
Five more, when it's a person
A company gets interviewed like an institution; a practitioner gets interviewed like a person. When the site is for someone's own practice — a coach, a teacher, a maker — these five come out.
Who is this for?
Twenty or sixty? Complete beginner or practiced? "Is this for me?" is the first question every visitor silently asks — answer it before anything else.
Be the customer
Describe yourself, concretely, and ask what happens for you: "I'm an 89-kilo man who wants a stronger core — what does it look like for me?" Concrete customers get concrete answers, and those answers are the copy.
Why you, when the internet is free?
The devil's-advocate question. The answer — community, correction, the accountability of committing — becomes the "why work with me" section.
Explain that word
Every time jargon appears, stop and ask for plain language — then offer a test definition back and let them correct it. You are writing the site's glossary live.
How do I make you human?
"We assume the teacher is perfect…" The answer to this one is usually the best sentence on the whole site.
The practicals
The four things every service visitor needs answered: when will I feel the difference, what do I bring, where do we meet, and what does it cost.
And before we even talk: a few reference websites you like, and the names you're thinking of registering.