How do you find out what buyers need from your website before a rebuild?

Website discovery means interviewing the people who shortlist and hire firms like yours before anything is designed, so the new site answers their questions. Here's who to interview, what to ask and how to turn the answers into a brief.

Why portfolio pages alone don't win the work.

Every firm that sells projects has a portfolio. Most of those portfolios look the same: a project photo, a headline figure, a one-line client name. Buyers glance at them and move on.

The problem isn't the portfolio. The problem is that the firm never asked buyers what they were actually looking for before commissioning the site.

Discovery fixes that. It means structured conversations with the people who shortlist and award contracts, set against the questions your current site doesn't answer.

This post is about how to run it, for firms that sell large, project-based work.

Who to interview and why it matters.

The single biggest discovery trap is interviewing the wrong buyer. When the work is a large project, the person who finds your website is rarely the person who signs the contract.

A typical shortlisting process involves at least three distinct roles:

• Procurement checks compliance, vets financials and compares like for like.
• Engineering or operations leads want technical credibility. They're looking for evidence you've solved the same problem before, at the same scale.
• The commercial or project director wants confidence you won't create problems.

Interview all three. You'll get different answers and you'll need content that speaks to each role at the right moment in the evaluation process.

Five to eight interviews is a sensible start. Stop when the answers stop surprising you.

How to structure the interviews.

Keep each session to 40 minutes. Use these questions as a starting point.

Opening the conversation: - Walk me through the last time you shortlisted a firm like ours. What triggered the search? - Where did you look first?

On your current site: - What did you find? What did you not find? - What made you confident enough to contact them, or not?

On the category: - What's the thing most firms in this space fail to communicate clearly? - What would make you trust a firm you hadn't worked with before?

Record the sessions with permission. Don't rely on notes. The exact words buyers use are the raw material for your messaging. "We needed to know they'd done offshore lifts in restricted tidal windows" is more useful than "we needed to see relevant experience."

Translating pain points into messaging and UX.

Once you have the transcripts, look for patterns across three categories.

Credibility signals. What proof points came up repeatedly? For a crane and heavy-lift firm, it might be lift capacity specifics and named port authorities. For an engineering consultancy, it might be named lead engineers and their professional registrations. These belong on the homepage and service pages.

Friction points. What did buyers say they couldn't find? "I couldn't tell which projects were recent" and "I didn't know who I'd actually be working with" are both problems with how the site is laid out. The first is solved by datestamping case studies. The second is solved by putting named project leads on the relevant service pages.

Objections. What almost stopped a buyer from progressing? These are the hardest to surface because buyers are polite. Ask directly: "Was there anything about the firm's site that gave you pause?" Then design content that pre-empts those objections before they form.

Testing assumptions before a single page is built.

Discovery outputs a set of assumptions about what buyers need. Before you move to design, test them.

The cheapest test is a structured wireframe review. Show three to five buyers a rough wireframe of the proposed homepage and ask: "If you landed here while evaluating firms for a project, would you keep reading?" You don't need a polished prototype. A PDF with boxes and placeholder text is enough.

What you're listening for:

• Points where they stop and say "I'd want to know X here"
• Anything they skip entirely (which tells you where you've over-invested)
• The moment they say "this is where I'd look for contact details" (which tells you how far through the page they expect to need to go)

This process catches structural errors before they're baked into the build. It's far cheaper to reorder a wireframe than to rebuild a live site. Our post on fast websites and business growth covers why getting this right before launch matters more than shipping speed.

Common discovery traps.

Interviewing your existing clients only. They're already convinced. You need to talk to buyers who evaluated you and went elsewhere, or who haven't engaged with you at all.

Conflating what buyers say with what they do. A procurement lead might say "we always go through the formal tender list" and then admit in the same conversation that they Googled a firm name after a recommendation. Watch for the gap.

Letting internal stakeholders override buyer evidence. If three buyers said they need to see lead engineer profiles and your managing director thinks that's "giving too much away", the buyers are right.

Treating discovery as a one-time event. Buyer priorities shift. A firm selling into the energy sector in 2024 heard different questions than one selling into the same sector now. Once a year, call a few recent prospects and ask the same questions.

A templated discovery brief for capital-project firms.

Use this before briefing any agency, including us.

1. Business context. What's the average project value? What's the typical sales cycle length? What's the ratio of repeat clients to new?
2. Buyer map. List the roles involved in shortlisting. Note who searches, who evaluates and who decides.
3. Interview summary. Three to five bullet points per interview: what they looked for, what they didn't find and what tipped their decision.
4. Content gaps. What does your current site not answer that buyers need answered?
5. Proof points. What evidence do you have that directly addresses those gaps? Named projects, named engineers, certifications, tonnage, geography.
6. Success metric. How will you know the new site is working? Count the qualified inquiries it brings in.

That brief takes a few hours to fill in properly, and it can save weeks of changes once a build is underway.

What discovery usually finds.

Done this way, discovery shows you the gap between what your buyers need to see and what your current site shows them.

For most firms, that gap is smaller than it feels. It's rarely a full rebuild. It's usually a restructured homepage, three or four new case study formats and a contact page that doesn't ask buyers to fill in a form with eleven fields. If the gap turns out to be bigger, see how we rebuild legacy websites.

If you're ready to work through this for your sector, book a call and we'll run the process with you.