Briefing the builder · 10 min read
A brief taken apart
Twenty words about a fencing business, read clause by clause: what each one bought, what the weak version of it costs, and a skeleton to fill in with your own.
Twenty words, and what they bought
This lesson takes one brief apart. It is the example on our own front page, it is twenty words long, and by the end you will be able to see what each clause did to the site that came back — and write your own the same way.
"I fit and repair garden fencing round Norwich. Twelve years at it, mostly private homes, a few schools."
Nothing about it is clever. It is what somebody would say if you asked what they did while they were loading a van. That is rather the point. It is four short facts, and every one of them moves something.
The four clauses
- I fit and repair garden fencing
- The work, named the way the trade names it, with both halves of it sitting in the verbs.
- round Norwich
- The area — one of only two things a build is allowed to stop and ask about.
- Twelve years at it
- A fact about the business that cannot be invented for you, so it has to be given.
- mostly private homes, a few schools
- Who the work is for, and in what proportion.
Clause by clause
I fit and repair garden fencing
Six words, and they do more than the other fourteen together. The noun is the one a customer would use. Not outdoor boundary solutions, not landscape products. Fencing.
The two verbs matter as much as the noun, and this is the part most people leave out. Fitting is a quoted job: somebody has been thinking about it for weeks, wants to see finished work with a town attached, and is going to compare three prices. Repairing is a different customer entirely — a panel is flat on the lawn after a gale and they want to know whether you can come this week. A site built for one serves the other badly. Naming both means the page can carry both.
This is also the clause the archetype matching reads, and the only one. Words about the outcome — quality, service, solutions — are not scored at all, because no brief in the library claims them. The previous lesson goes into that properly.
Note. "Garden" is not padding. It separates this business from a fencing club and from security fencing on an industrial estate, both of which are real trades with completely different websites.
round Norwich
The area is one of exactly two things a build is permitted to stop and ask about, the other being the trade itself. Everything else it decides on its own. So a brief carrying the town has already answered half of what a question would have cost, and a turn that asks a question writes no files.
"Round" is the honest word and it survives into the copy. A town with "round" in front of it is a centre rather than a boundary, which is what a local trade actually has. If a question does come back, the answer worth giving has the same shape: "Norwich, plus Wymondham and Attleborough. Anything past about twenty miles has to be worth the drive." Three named places and a rule, instead of a radius.
Named towns are the only thing an area section can be built from. There is no map to draw and an invented one would be worse than none, so a brief saying "the surrounding areas" gets a section that says the surrounding areas back to you.
Twelve years at it
This is the clause people leave out most often, and the one nothing else can replace.
A build is forbidden from inventing a years-in-business figure, and that is a hard rule rather than a preference. The same rule covers phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, certifications, registration numbers, insurance policies, star ratings and review counts. Those things end up on a real business's live site, where a made-up registration number is a trading-standards problem rather than a copy problem.
So there are two outcomes and no third. Give the figure and it gets used — in the hero, in the about section, probably in the footer. Withhold it and you get a plainly marked placeholder with a line saying what it needs. The placeholder is the honest result, and it is also a job you now have to go and do.
Tip. Anything true, checkable and only yours is worth a clause: how long, how many, what you are registered with, what you refuse to touch. Four of those beats four hundred words of description.
mostly private homes, a few schools
The last clause looks like small talk. It is the one that decides what the sections are about.
Private homes and schools want opposite things from a fencing contractor. A homeowner wants the price of a panel, whether you clear up, and how long you will be in the garden. A school wants public liability, DBS checks, invoicing on account, and the work done in the holidays. A site treating them equally reads as slightly wrong to both.
"Mostly" and "a few" are doing the sorting. They say build for the homeowner and give the schools a paragraph — a judgement the build cannot make on its own. With no proportion given, the two get equal weight, and equal weight is the wrong answer for this business.
Note. You do not have to be flattering about it. "Mostly landlords, and I would rather it was not" is a more useful clause than a list of everybody you have ever worked for.
What it did not say, and why that was right
There is no colour in that brief. No list of sections, no instruction about tone, no font, no mention of a logo. That is not an oversight, and adding them would not have bought much.
A build never asks about any of those. It is told not to: colour scheme, section order, copy tone and which sections to include are things it is expected to decide well and quietly, because a question costs a turn and a turn spent asking is a site you did not get. So they get decided either way. The only question is whether you had a say in it.
Which makes the first message the one free place to set them. Put "dark, no stock photographs, keep it short" in the same sentence and it is honoured at no extra cost. Leave it out and you get its judgement, and changing that afterwards is an ordinary turn — cheap, but not free.
Note. The one thing worth adding for its own sake is what you want a visitor to do: ring, book, send photographs, come to the unit. A build will pick one if you do not, and on a business where that choice matters it is a coin toss.
The same business, written badly
Here is the same twelve-year-old fencing business, described the way a lot of people describe themselves when there is an empty box in front of them.
"Fencing and landscaping solutions for domestic and commercial customers across East Anglia. Quality workmanship, competitive prices, fully insured."
Twenty-one words. One more than the good version, and nearly every one of them spent on something that cannot be built from.
| What went missing | What the site does instead |
|---|---|
| The town | An area section about East Anglia, which is not a place anybody searches for a fence in |
| Fitting and repairing as different jobs | One services section serving the quoted customer and the storm customer equally badly |
| Twelve years | A plainly marked placeholder, or a sentence written round the gap |
| Private homes and schools | Copy pitched at nobody, because domestic and commercial describes every trade there is |
| A price of any kind | "Competitive prices" handed back, which is what the reader had already assumed |
| One clear trade for the matching | Two trades with a word each, which scores level, so neither brief is used |
Note. "Fully insured" is the interesting one, because it survives — you said it, so it gets used. But it is the weakest form of the strongest thing in that sentence. "Fully insured" is a claim. "Public liability to two million, certificate on the site" is a fact, and the fact is what the school wanted to read.
What the weak version actually costs
A thin brief does not buy you a question. It buys you a site. The builder is told never to put a question to you: where the brief leaves something out it makes the obvious call and builds anyway, so nothing stops to check whether the call was the one you would have made.
The only signal you get is a line underneath. Where a guess was a real fork in the road it says which way it went, in one sentence, phrased so you can turn it round — something like: I have written it as a Norwich business, say the word and I will change the area. Read that line before you read the site. It is the shortest description you will ever get of what your words did not settle.
So the cost of vagueness is not an interruption, it is a whole build about a business that could be anybody's — and then a second turn to put it right. Your first complete build is free, once. The turn that corrects it is not.
Tip. The fix is not writing more. The good version is shorter than the bad one. It is writing facts instead of adjectives.
A skeleton you can fill in
Five clauses. Say them out loud first, then type what you said.
The five clauses
- The work
- What you physically do, in the words your customers use. Keep the verbs if the jobs differ — fit and repair, install and service, cut and colour.
- The place
- The town you are actually based in, plus two or three you cover. Not a county, not a region, not a radius.
- One fact only you have
- Years, number of jobs, a registration, an accreditation, a guarantee. Something checkable, because nothing checkable can be invented for you.
- Who it is mostly for
- And in what proportion. "Mostly" and "a few" are the two most useful words in the whole brief.
- What you want them to do
- Ring, book online, send photographs, come to the unit. One of them, named.
Tip. Attach your photographs in the same message. Pictures of your own work are the only pictures of yours that can end up on the site, and the first build is the cheapest place to put them in.
One filled in, for a different trade
"I service and repair boilers round Wakefield and Ossett. Gas Safe, eight years on my own, mostly landlords and a few letting agents. I would rather people rang than filled a form in."
Thirty-eight words, five facts, nothing invented. The trade in the words a customer uses, two towns rather than a county, a registration and a number of years that could not have been guessed at, a customer mix with a proportion on it, and the one thing a visitor is meant to do.
Send that and read what comes back. If the hero names the work and the area in its first sentence, and the sections are things a landlord would scroll for, the brief did its job. If it reads as though it could belong to anybody, the next lesson is about changing that without starting the project again.
Note. It does not have to be tidy and it does not have to be spelled well. Half sentences are fine. What it has to be is true and specific, because those are the two things nothing else in the product can supply on your behalf.
Common questions
- Does a longer brief cost more credits?
- Not meaningfully. A turn is charged for what it actually used, and reading twenty extra words is nothing beside writing a whole site. The expensive path is the short vague brief followed by a second build to correct it.
- What if I get a fact wrong in the first message?
- Say so on the next turn and it changes. That is an ordinary correction and it rewrites only the files carrying the fact. The reason to get it right first time is the turn it saves, not any difficulty in fixing it.
- Should I write it as a list rather than sentences?
- Sentences. It is read as English by the thing that writes your copy, and a list of fragments gives it fragments to work from. A list of towns inside a sentence is perfectly fine.
- Can I paste in the text from my old website?
- Yes, and it is often the quickest way to hand over facts you would otherwise forget — registration numbers, the guarantee, the full list of what you fit. Read it through first for anything that stopped being true, because it will be used as given.