A client once told me he wanted his website clean and modern. I hear that phrase a lot. I usually take it to mean minimal, plenty of white space, nothing shouting for attention.
Then we sat down and built his moodboard. Every image he picked was heavy corporate stock photography. Men in suits shaking hands. Glass towers. The kind of thing you see on a bank’s homepage. Not minimal. Not even close.
That is the trouble with clean and modern. It sounds like an instruction. It is really just two words doing a job they cannot actually do.
I have this same conversation with small business owners across Harrogate and Yorkshire, usually right at the start of a project.
Clean and modern is not a brief
Ask five people what clean and modern means and you get five different websites in their heads. To one person it means white space and a plain font. To another it means the exact opposite, glossy photography and corporate blue. Neither person is wrong. They are just picturing different things, and I cannot read minds from a phrase.
This is not about finding better words. Nobody expects a business owner to talk like a designer. It is about giving me something solid to work from, rather than an adjective that could mean almost anything.
What a designer actually needs to hear
Before the first call, it helps if you have thought about a few things.
- Who looks at this site, and what you want them to do once they land on it. Book a call. Buy something. Pick up the phone.
- What is working on your current site, if you have one, and what genuinely is not.
- Three websites you like, and why. More on this below.
- Whatever content already exists. Photos, an old about page, testimonials, anything.
None of that needs design language. It just needs twenty minutes of thinking about your own business before we speak.
Show me three sites, not a mood
Instead of asking a client to describe a look, I ask for three websites. Any three, as long as they are real, and I ask them to tell me what they like about each one.
This works better than an adjective because you are pointing at something real. It does not remove all the guesswork though. Ask two people for three sites each and you often get six sites and six completely different reasons. One person likes a site because the navigation is simple. Another likes the same site because of the colours.
That is not the exercise failing. That is the exercise working. It tells me what you actually respond to, not what you think you are supposed to say. Clean and modern hides that information. Three real sites and your reasons for liking them do not.
If you are getting ready for a first call with a web designer, this is worth doing beforehand. Three sites, a line or two on what you like about each. That is a better brief than a page of adjectives.
What to decide now, and what can wait
Not everything needs deciding before the first meeting. Colours, fonts, layout, all of that gets worked out together, usually with your input at each stage. You do not need answers to any of it on day one.
The one thing worth sorting early, if you are planning a new website, is your content. The actual words and photos that will end up on the site.
I built a site for a podcaster a while back. The build itself went fine. Then it sat there finished, waiting, while we chased up the writing and the photos. The design was ready long before the words were.
This happens more than people expect. Design gets treated as the big job and content as an afterthought, when it is often the other way round. If you have old photos, testimonials, or an about page you wrote once and never used, dig them out now. It saves time later, and it means the site can go live when it is actually ready.
The short version
That is really the whole trick to briefing a web designer. Give me something real instead of an adjective. Three sites you like and why. A rough idea of what you want visitors to do. Whatever content you already have, even if it is old or incomplete.
Bring that to the first call and we get further, faster. If you have not booked yours yet, get in touch and we will find a time.
