What your first message decides

The only description it ever gets

By the end of this lesson you will know which parts of your site are settled the moment you press send, and which you can safely leave alone and fix later for the price of a short turn.

The first message is the whole brief. There is no form you filled in earlier, no business profile on your account, no settings screen being read in the background. What you typed into that box, plus any pictures you attached to it, is everything the builder knows about your business.

And it does not stop to interview you. On a brand-new project it makes every call it has to make and writes the site — no questions, no form, no "before I start, could you just confirm". Your first build is free, once, and every turn after it comes out of credits you have bought. A question before the build would have been a build you did not get.

Note. Longer helps and clever does not. Say what you do, where you do it and who you do it for, in the words you would use standing in front of somebody. No phrasing unlocks a better site.

Four things it settles without asking

The instructions the builder works to name four things it must never put to you as a question: the colour scheme, the order of the sections, the tone of the copy, and which sections the site has at all. They are on that list because a decent answer can be invented, and a question about any of them would cost a turn to no purpose.

So they get invented. Every time, quietly, out of the words you typed — and you find out what was decided by looking at the result.

• The colours, and the typefaces they are set in.
• Which sections exist — services, the area, charges, an FAQ, a contact block.
• What order they come in, and how many there are.
• The voice of the copy: brisk and practical, or warm and unhurried.

Note. None of this is permanent. All four change on a later turn for the price of one sentence. The point is that they are decided whether or not you had a view, so a view you actually hold is worth eight words now rather than a turn afterwards.

The trade you name picks the shape

Behind the builder sits a library of briefs, one for each kind of business. Forty-eight of them exist today: a same-day callout trade, a project trade, a salon, a gym, a restaurant, a clinic, a shop. Each names the sections in order, the palette, the type, and the one move that stops the page reading as a generic draft.

Nobody asks which one you are. It is chosen from the words in your message. Write plumber, boiler, drain, locksmith or callout and the same-day callout brief is what the build gets: the phone number as readable text in the header rather than an icon, the area written out as named towns because there is no map to drop in, a charges section with the callout fee in it, and a call bar pinned to the bottom of a phone screen.

The matching is blunt on purpose. The highest score wins and a tie loses — two shapes scoring level is the case where your words did not say which, so both are dropped and the build falls back to the general instructions. A wrong shape is worse than no shape: a barber's brief handed to a solicitor is a confidently wrong draft, and confidently wrong is what makes somebody distrust everything else on the screen.

Tip. This happens once, on the build that creates the site, and never again. Say "actually I am a plumber" on the second turn and you get a correction to a site that was never shaped like a plumber's. It is the strongest single reason to name the trade plainly the first time.

What belongs in it, and what does not

The test is short. If the builder would never ask about it and you would mind it being wrong, it goes in. If it would invent it well enough and you have no strong view, leave it out and spend the words elsewhere.

• Leave out words that describe no decision. Modern, clean, professional. Every site is meant to be all of those, so they narrow nothing and eat the room a real fact would have used.
• Leave out instructions about how it should be made. Which font to load, which framework. The build has its own rules about what it may use, and yours will be ignored or refused.
• Leave out anything you have not decided. A price you are still thinking about, an offer you might run in spring. Cheap to add once you know, expensive to argue with once it is on the page.

Worth a sentence each

The trade, in customers' words

What somebody would type into a phone at half six in the morning. Fencing, boiler repairs, end of tenancy cleans — not a job title.

The area, named

Towns rather than a radius. "Norwich, plus Wymondham and Attleborough" builds an area section somebody recognises. "The East of England" does not.

Who you work for

Private homes, landlords, schools, other trades. It changes the copy in every section.

Any colour you actually mind about

Your van is green, or the last site was navy and you hated it. This one will definitely be decided without you.

A section you know you need

Prices, a gallery, an area list. A section that was never written is not one you can move.

Photographs of your own work

Attached to this message, not promised for later. Up to four at a time.

Note. One thing to leave out for a different reason: never approximate a fact. A registration number you cannot check, a years-trading figure you would have to round. The next lesson is about that, and the short version is that a gap is safe and a wrong number is not.

The one line it gives back

Where the build had to guess something that was a real fork in the road, it is told to say which way it went — in one short line under the reply, worded so that changing it is a sentence rather than an argument. It reads like this:

"I've written it as a Norwich business — say the word and I'll change the area."

Read that line before you read the site. It is the only place a guess is admitted out loud. Everything else — the palette, the section order, the voice, which of forty-eight shapes your trade landed on — was decided in silence, and the only way to find those is to look.

Note. There is no line when nothing forked, which is common on a message that named the trade and the area. Its absence is not a warning. Its presence is the build telling you where it came closest to being wrong.

The questions it does ask, and when

Nothing is asked on a new project. Once a site exists there are two narrow places where the builder stops and puts a choice to you, and both exist because guessing there would cost you money or destroy something you liked.

The first is a vague change to one existing part — "smarten up the header". Three plausible readings of that are three different headers. The second is a picture change that does not say what to do with the picture: drawing a new one, using one you already have and re-cropping the one that is there are three different jobs with three different bills.

Note. A turn that asks writes no files. That is a rule rather than a habit — the question and the build never happen together.

A first message that works

This is the one on our own front page, and it is shorter than people expect:

"I fit and repair garden fencing round Norwich. Twelve years at it, mostly private homes, a few schools."

Twenty-three words, four facts, no adjectives. The trade is in the words a customer would type. A town is named. The figure for how long is a real one, because the person knew it. And there is a line about who the customers are, which changes the copy in every section.

Now the same thing with the things it would never ask about added:

"I fit and repair garden fencing round Norwich — Wymondham and Attleborough too, anything past about twenty miles has to be worth the drive. Twelve years at it, mostly private homes and a few schools. Keep it plain and green rather than corporate, and put the phone number where a thumb can reach it. Three photos of recent jobs attached."

Still under sixty words, and it has settled the colour, the tone, the area, one thing about the header and the photographs — none of which would have been asked about.

• The trade appears in the words a customer would type, not as a job title.
• At least one town is named, and the edge of the patch is described plainly.
• Anything you would be annoyed to find wrong is written down.
• Nothing in it describes how the site should be built.
• Your own photographs are attached rather than promised for later.

Tip. If you find yourself writing about how the site should feel, stop and write a fact instead. "Mostly landlords and letting agents" shapes the copy more than any amount of writing about tone.

Common questions

Will it ask me anything before it builds?

Not on a new project. It makes the calls it needs to make and writes the site, then names at most one guess in a line underneath. The questions that do come back are about changing a picture or a vague redesign, and both need a site to already exist.

What happens if I describe the trade wrongly?

The shape of the draft is picked once, from that message, and never picked again. You can correct the words on the site in a turn, but you cannot get the callout layout onto a site drafted as something else without starting the project again.