Name the trade plainly

The few words that decide the draft

By the end of this you will be able to write the part of a brief that names your work, and tell from the site that comes back whether it landed. It is a small piece of writing — usually under ten words — and it changes the first draft more than everything else you type put together.

The reason is simple enough. A build has to produce a whole site in one go: a header, a hero, five sections, a footer, and copy with real depth in all of them. It can only write about what you named. Name the work plainly and every section has a subject. Name it the way a brochure would and the site comes back polished and about nothing in particular, which is the harder fault to fix. A wrong colour is one sentence. A site with no subject is another build.

Your words are read twice

Two separate things happen to the sentence you type, and they behave differently. Both are worth knowing, because everything else on this page falls out of them.

The first is a matcher. There are 48 written briefs inside the product, each one for a shape of business we see often — a same-day callout trade, quoted building work, a salon, a clinic, a restaurant, a gym, a shop, a portfolio of visual work. Your words are scored against the trade words each brief claims, within whichever kind you picked under the box, and the highest score wins. Level scores win nothing.

The second reader is the build itself, which takes your sentence as plain English and writes from it. That happens whether or not a brief was matched, and it is the larger half of the job.

How the matching behaves

What it reads

Words for the work. Trade nouns, kinds of business, kinds of job. Nothing else in the sentence is scored.

What decides it

A count of distinct words. Saying the trade four times counts once, so repetition buys nothing.

What a draw does

Drops both. Two briefs scoring level is exactly the case where the words did not say which.

What happens with no match

The generic brief runs — the one every build on the platform used before this library existed, and it produces a whole site.

Whether you can see which ran

No. It is not shown anywhere in the app, and there is no published list to write for.

Note. A wrong brief is worse than no brief, and that is the whole design of it. Handing a barber's brief to a firm of solicitors produces a confidently wrong draft, and confidently wrong is the one result that makes somebody distrust everything else on the screen. So ambiguity resolves to nothing rather than to a guess.

Plain beats polished

The instinct, when a box asks you to describe your business, is to write the way businesses write about themselves. Resist it. The polished version of a trade is usually the version with the trade taken out.

Notice what the middle column below is doing. It names the work with the noun the trade itself uses. It says what the job physically is. It adds one detail that could not honestly be said about somebody else. None of it is clever and none of it took longer to type than the version on the left.

Tip. If a sentence would still be true with somebody else's trade dropped into it, it is not describing your trade. That test takes five seconds and it catches almost everything.

The words that carry nothing

Some words are not merely weak. They are invisible to the matching, because no brief in the library claims a word for a virtue — they claim words for kinds of work. And they are close to invisible to the build as well, because there is nothing in them to write a paragraph from.

Every one of these can appear four times in a brief and change nothing at all about what gets built.

• Solutions, services, care, works — nouns standing in for the job instead of naming it.
• Quality, professional, reliable, trusted, passionate — claims a competitor can make in the same words on the same afternoon.
• Bespoke, tailored, second to none — promises about how the work is done, before anybody knows what the work is.
• Domestic and commercial — true of most trades, and it still does not say what you fit.
• Across the region, nationwide, the surrounding areas — an area with no towns in it, which cannot become a section that names towns.

Note. None of these are banned and none of them will spoil a draft. They simply do not pay for the space they take, and you are only going to type so many words before you press send.

When you honestly do two trades

Plenty of people do. A plumber who also does roofing. A joiner who fits kitchens. A salon with a coffee counter at the front. This is the one case where the plain advice needs a second sentence, because a brief giving each trade a single word is exactly the case where nothing gets picked.

Write "I do plumbing and roofing in Leeds" and the score comes out level — one word each — so both briefs are dropped and the generic one runs. Nothing is broken. You just paid for a shaped brief and did not get one.

1. Decide which trade the site is mainly for. Usually that is the one paying the bills rather than the one you enjoy most.
2. Write that one properly: what you do, the kinds of job it covers, and the words a customer would use for them.
3. Give the second its own clause, as work you also take on. "I am a plumber in Leeds doing boiler work and leaks. I also do a bit of roofing." That is enough for it to get a section of its own.
4. If the two really are equal businesses, they are two websites. One site trying to be both leads with neither, and that is a positioning problem rather than a briefing one.

Note. The second trade does not vanish when it loses. The whole sentence still reaches the build as English, so the roofing gets written about — it just is not the shape the page is built around.

How to tell it landed

You cannot see which brief was picked, and hunting for it would be the wrong instinct anyway. What you can do is read the draft against three questions, which takes about a minute.

1. Read the first sentence of the hero. It should say what the work is and who it is for. If it says something about commitment or standards instead, the naming did not land.
2. Read the section headings on their own, ignoring everything under them. They should be the things one of your customers would scroll looking for. A callout trade wants charges and the area covered; quoted work wants finished jobs with towns attached.
3. Read one paragraph from the middle of the page and ask whether a competitor could paste it onto their own site without changing a word. If they could, the words naming the work were not specific enough.

Tip. All three are fixed by one more turn carrying a better sentence, not by starting the project again. Say what you actually do, plainly, and ask for the site to be rewritten round it.

Common questions

Is there a list of the trades that have their own brief?

Not one we publish, and it changes as briefs get written. Writing for a list would be the wrong instinct in any case — the moment you pick words to hit a match rather than to describe the work, the second reader, which is the thing writing your copy, gets a worse sentence. Describe the job and the match takes care of itself.

My trade is unusual. Am I worse off?

Barely. A brief matching nothing runs the generic one, which is what every build used before the library existed and still produces a whole site. What you lose is a page shaped by somebody who thought hard about your kind of business in advance. What you keep is everything that comes from naming the work clearly, and that is the larger part.

Should I use the words people type into a search?

Use the words you would say out loud to somebody standing in front of you, which are usually the same words. What not to do is send a list of search terms instead of a sentence. It is read as English by the thing writing your copy, and a keyword list is not English.

Does it help to say the trade twice?

No. Distinct words are what get counted, so a repeat adds nothing to the matching, and the build has already understood you. Saying it once and then naming the actual jobs is worth far more, because the jobs are what the sections get written from.