The discovery call is the single most important hour of a web project. It is where scope is set, expectations are formed, and every decision that follows gets its direction. Yet most agencies run it from memory — and the quality of the questions decides the quality of everything downstream.
Below is a practical checklist, grouped the way a good call actually flows. You will not ask all 37 on every call, but having them in front of you means nothing important gets missed.
The business
- In one sentence, what does your business do?
- Who are your best customers, and what do they have in common?
- Who are your main competitors, and what do you think of their sites?
- What makes you different from them?
- What does a customer typically do right before they buy?
Goals for the site
- What is the single most important thing this website needs to do?
- How will you know, in six months, that it worked?
- What does the current site get wrong?
- Is this a refresh, a rebuild, or a brand-new site?
- What action do you most want a visitor to take?
Audience & content
- Who is the primary audience, and what do they care about?
- What pages do you imagine the site having?
- Do you have copy already, or does it need to be written?
- Do you have photography and brand assets, or are those needed?
- Is there content on the current site you must keep?
Services, booking & payments
- What exactly do you sell, and how is it structured?
- Do customers need to book appointments? Through what system?
- Do you take payments online? Subscriptions, one-off, invoices?
- Any tools that must integrate — CRM, email, calendar, POS?
Design direction
- Show me two or three sites you love — and tell me why.
- Are there sites you dislike? What puts you off?
- How should the site feel — words, not colours?
- Do you have a logo, fonts and colours, or is branding part of this?
Technical & logistics
- Do you own the domain? Where is it registered?
- Who hosts the current site, and do you have access?
- Do you need specific functionality — multilingual, members, search?
- Are there SEO rankings or URLs that must be preserved?
- Who maintains the site after launch?
Timeline, budget & decision-making
- Is there a deadline or launch date driving this?
- What budget range are you working within?
- Who needs to sign off, and who is the final decision-maker?
- What could slow this project down before it even starts?
- Have you worked with an agency before? How did it go?
- What would make this project a success for you, personally?
- Is there anything I haven’t asked that I should have?
The hard part isn’t asking — it’s capturing
Asking good questions is only half the job. The answers have to survive the journey from the call to whoever builds the site — and that is where most of the detail leaks. Notes get thin. Nuance gets lost. The developer ends up guessing.
That is exactly the gap we built Briefpad to close: it sits on the call, captures every answer, and turns the conversation into a structured brief automatically — so the questions you asked actually reach the people who build.