How to describe your business so you get the right site

Spanli starts by asking what your business is. Most people look at that box for a while and then write something that sounds like a brochure. "We are a customer focused provider of quality solutions." It is not wrong. It is just not about anything, and a site built from it will be as vague as the sentence that started it.

Here is what actually helps.

Say the plain thing first

Write the sentence you would say to someone who asked what you do while you were standing in a queue. Not the polished version. The plain one.

"I cut hair. Two chairs, in the old part of town, mostly regulars."

"I am a plumber. Emergency call outs and bathroom fitting, about twenty miles around."

"We bake bread and pastries and sell them from a shop on the high street."

Every one of those is enough to build a site around, because each answers the three things a visitor needs in their first few seconds: what you do, who it is for, and roughly where.

Name the things you actually sell

The second most useful thing you can write is a list. Cuts, colour, blow dry. Boiler repair, bathroom fitting, emergency call outs. Sourdough, pastries, celebration cakes, wholesale.

That list does real work. It becomes the sections of your site, and often the pages, so a site built from a description with a list in it arrives with somewhere to put your prices and your photographs. A site built from a description without one arrives as a single page of pleasant sentences that you then have to fill in yourself.

Say what you want a visitor to do

A website is not a leaflet. It is asking someone to take one step, and the step is different for every trade. A salon wants a booking. A plumber wants the phone to ring. A consultant wants a message with enough detail to reply properly. A bakery mostly wants you to know it exists and where it is.

Write down the step you want. It decides what the buttons say and where they go, which is most of the difference between a site that gets you work and a site that just sits there.

Mention the awkward things

The parts you would rather not write down are usually the parts that save you time later. You only take cash. You do not work weekends. You have a minimum order. You cover a specific set of postcodes. You have a waiting list.

Say all of it. Every one of those lines is a conversation you do not have to have twelve more times, and putting them on the site is what stops the wrong enquiries arriving in the first place.

What you do not need to say

You do not need to describe how it should look. Not colours, not fonts, not layouts, and definitely not words like modern, clean or minimal, which mean something different to everybody who reads them.

The look is a separate step, and it is a visual one. You pick a starting look, then turn one dial at a time for colour, fonts, corners, spacing and how the menu sits, and the preview beside you changes as you go. Choosing from things you can see beats describing something you cannot, so spending your description on adjectives is spending it on the wrong thing.

You also do not need to write well. Nobody is marking it. Notes, half sentences and a list are all fine.

If you would rather not write anything

Not everyone wants to start from a blank box, so there are three other ways in. You can paste your LinkedIn profile or company page and let your existing history do the describing. You can hand over the address of the site you already have, if the problem is that it looks ten years old rather than that it does not exist. Or you can answer nothing at all and let Spanli choose for you, then correct what it got wrong.

That last one sounds reckless and mostly is not. It is often easier to react to something concrete than to describe something imaginary, and reacting is exactly what the rest of the process is built for.

You are not locked into any of it

Whatever you write, the first build is a draft, not a verdict. You change it by asking, in the same words you would use with a person, and you can point at any part of the preview and say what should be different about that specific thing. Every round of changes leaves a saved version behind, so an experiment that goes badly is one request away from being undone, and nothing reaches your visitors until you publish it.

Which means the description is worth ten minutes of thought, not an afternoon. Write the plain sentence, add the list, say what you want people to do, and go and look at what comes back.

Building and previewing are free, with no card, so you can try your two sentences and see the result before deciding anything. Build free.