Start with the business outcome
Explain why the project exists before listing pages or features. Useful outcomes include increasing qualified enquiries, reducing support requests, improving recruitment, enabling self-service, or replacing a system that is difficult to maintain.
Add a small set of measurable indicators. These might include completed enquiries, successful purchases, task-completion rate, organic landing-page traffic, publishing time, or support-ticket volume.
Describe the audience and their decisions
Identify the primary audiences, what they already know, what questions they need answered, and what action they should be able to complete. Include important accessibility, language, device, and location considerations.
Real customer questions are more useful than vague personas. Sales calls, support messages, internal search terms, and analytics can reveal the language and concerns the website needs to address.
Inventory content, functionality, and integrations
List existing content that can be retained, material that needs revision, and new content that must be created. Assign an owner and approval path because late content is a common cause of delayed launches.
Describe functional needs as user journeys: request a quote, find a service, purchase a product, book a time, or manage an account. Document integrations such as payments, CRM, email marketing, analytics, authentication, inventory, and internal APIs.
Make constraints visible
State the target launch window, available budget range, legal or compliance requirements, hosting constraints, internal technologies, and people responsible for decisions. Constraints help the team recommend an appropriate scope instead of an idealized one.
Separate requirements that are essential for launch from useful later improvements. This protects the central outcome when new ideas appear during delivery.
Define launch and ownership
A website needs an owner after release. Agree who will publish content, review analytics, manage software updates, monitor forms and uptime, respond to security issues, and prioritize improvements.
Ask prospective partners to explain discovery, accessibility, performance, technical SEO, testing, migration, analytics, deployment, training, documentation, and post-launch support. Their answers are more useful than a list of technologies alone.