The short answer: before anyone builds your website — an agency, a freelancer, us, or you — gather eight things: a one-sentence description, your services with rough pricing, the areas you serve, six real photos, your proof (reviews, years, quals), exact contact details and hours, the three questions customers always ask, and links to wherever you already appear online. Twenty minutes. It improves every build it touches.
Why prep beats budget
Two identical cafés hire the same designer. One hands over a folder: photos, menu, story, reviews. The other says “just make it look professional, you’re the expert.” The first café gets a better website every single time — not because the designer plays favourites, but because websites are made of specifics, and only you have yours.
This list is route-agnostic. Handing it to a $4,000 agency saves you a fortnight of email ping-pong. Handing it to us makes the day-one draft dramatically better. Keeping it for yourself makes DIY survivable.
The eight things
1. One sentence: what you do, for whom, where
“Gib fixing and plastering for renovations and new builds across Christchurch.” Boring is perfect. This sentence becomes your page’s headline and the exact phrase search engines and AI assistants quote — vague taglines (“Quality you can trust”) give them nothing to work with.
2. Your services, with numbers attached
List what you actually sell — the things you want more of first. Against each: a price, a from-price, or one sentence on how quoting works. If you’d rather not publish numbers, say how the money conversation starts (“free quotes within 24 hours”). Pages that say something about money filter tyre-kickers and earn trust; total silence does the opposite.
3. The areas you serve, spelled out
Machines can’t infer your travel radius and neither can customers. “Tauranga, Mount Maunganui, Pāpāmoa, and greater Bay of Plenty by arrangement” — suburbs and towns by name. This single list does more for “near me” visibility than most paid tricks.
4. Six real photos
Phone camera, daylight, landscape. The work, the van, the premises, your face. Skip filters and skip stock — NZ customers smell stock photography instantly, and a real photo of a real job is proof no library image can fake. Six is the floor; ten is better.
5. Your proof
Screenshots or links to your Google and Facebook reviews, years in business, certifications, memberships, awards, notable jobs. Don’t be modest — this is the section that converts. If your reviews are thin, start fixing that this week with our honest reviews system.
6. Contact, hours, and what happens next
The exact phone number, email, hours — and your response promise (“we reply same day”). Decide the one action you most want: call, text, form, booking. Everything on the page will point at it.
7. The three questions customers always ask
You already know them — you answer them every week on the phone. “Do you do small jobs?” “How soon can you come?” “Do you take card?” Written down, they become your FAQ section: the part of the page AI assistants quote most readily, as we cover in getting found on AI search.
8. Where you already exist online
Links to your Facebook page, Instagram, Google Business Profile, directory listings. Two reasons: there’s usable material in them, and every detail — name, number, address — must match everywhere, because inconsistency quietly erodes trust with customers and machines alike.
What happens to the list
Whoever builds your site turns this raw material into structure: the sentence becomes the headline, the services become sections, the questions become the FAQ, the proof gets placed where doubt happens. On LaunchPad, this list is the brief — you tell us about the business in a couple of minutes, we build from it, and the more of the eight you give us, the better the site that comes back. The InternetNZ research is blunt about what’s at stake: 74% of consumers treat your website as the main way to engage — these eight things are what they’re hoping to find on it.