The developer asks for the content and the project stops. Weeks pass while the founder tries to write an About page, a services page and a homepage headline, and every draft sounds either too modest or like every other business in the sector. Most website projects that stall do so because of decisions nobody made before investing in a website. Five decisions settle most of what the site will say, and the two that matter most are the two founders feel surest about.
The first decision is who the website is for, named precisely enough to write for
Ask a founder who their website is for and the answer is usually a category: SMEs in Nairobi, NGOs, growing businesses, corporates. A category tells a writer nothing about what the homepage should say, because everyone in it arrives with a different problem.
A buyer is specific. It is the owner of a fifteen-person logistics firm who has outgrown referrals and is weighing a consultant against hiring a marketing manager. That sentence tells a writer what the first screen of the site has to answer.
The difficulty is that founders know their business from the inside, and the inside view organises everything by how the work is done. One specialist consultancy with more than a decade of expertise had been building its website for over a year. The pages were organised by how the firm delivered its work: training, coaching, assessments, consultancy. Buyers arrived with a problem in a specific field, such as a food safety gap or an audit coming up, and found no page for it. Every page stalled at the same point, because the content questions were positioning questions the business had never answered.
The team knew its work thoroughly. The site was organised the way they experienced the business, and buyers experience it differently.
The second decision is what a stranger needs to understand before trusting you
A founder explains the business in person, with context, conviction and the chance to answer questions. The website has to do the same job without the founder in the room, for someone who has never met them and is deciding in seconds whether to keep reading.
A founder setting up a new law firm arrived with a fully formed brand: a powerful image and a slogan that expressed exactly what the practice stood for. Everything in it was true. It was also built for people who already understood her work, and the strangers the firm most needed to reach, from funders to property buyers, would have met it before they had decided to trust the firm. The brief had also left out one of the firm’s two practices entirely. The instinct was right about the feeling and wrong about the form.
Both founders knew their businesses better than anyone. That is precisely why these two decisions are hard to make alone: they have to be answered from where the buyer stands, and the founder is the one person who cannot stand there.
Two tests show whether the answers are ready. If your answer to the first decision is still a category, or your answer to the second would only make full sense to someone who already knows you, the website will inherit the gap. A Build Readiness Review settles those answers before the build locks them in.
Three practical decisions shape the build itself
The third decision is the one action the site should produce.
For one business it is a WhatsApp message, for another a booked call, a quote request or a purchase. Every page should lead there, and the design follows from it.
The fourth is who will maintain the site, which settles the platform.
A team that will update its own prices and services needs a platform it can edit without the developer, which is part of the choice between building it yourself and commissioning it. Register the domain in the business’s name and keep the logins in-house.
The fifth is how you will know the site is working.
Decide what success means in the first three months, whether enquiries, calls, WhatsApp conversations or sales, and make sure the site is set up to count them from launch.
What a brief looks like when the decisions hold
When all five decisions are settled, they fit on one page: the buyer, what they need to understand, the main action, who maintains the site and how success is measured, with the pages you expect and a budget range. A realistic picture of website prices in Kenya helps set that range.
A brief like this makes quotes comparable, shortens the build and gives you a standard to judge the finished site against. A brief that skips the first two decisions produces a site that looks finished and says what the founder already knows.
The first two decisions are where an outside view earns its place
Both founders above were clear about their work. What changed the outcome was a view of the business from the buyer’s side, at the moment it mattered, before the build fixed their assumptions in place.
You do not need to arrive with the brief finished. Every Qallann website build begins by working through these decisions with you, before any design starts. Start your website project with Qallann.
