From nothing to something
The hardest prompt you will ever write is the first one, because there is nothing on screen to react to yet.
The fix is not a clever phrase. It is deciding five things before you type.
Who it is for. Not "a website" but "a site for people deciding whether to hire a wedding photographer." One sentence.
What it is called. A real name, even a placeholder one. Anonymous sites come out anonymous.
What sections it has. Say them, in order. This is the single biggest lever you have, and lesson 3 is entirely about it.
What it should feel like. Two or three words. Calm, warm, plain, technical, playful. Not a mood board, just a direction.
What you want the visitor to do. Read something, note a date, get in touch, look at some work. If you cannot answer this one, the site does not have a job yet.
Five answers is a starter prompt. Here is one you can copy and edit.
Build a one page website for a small dog grooming business
called Ruff Cuts, in Manchester.
The visitor is someone searching for a groomer near them
and deciding whether to call.
Sections, in this order:
- A short opening with the business name, what it does, where it is
- Services, as a simple list with one line of description each
- Opening hours
- A short paragraph about the owner
- How to get in touch, with a phone number and an email address
Tone: warm, plain, no jargon, no stock marketing language.
The visitor should end up either calling or emailing.
@Sites Build me a one page personal site for Priya Raman,
a technical writer. One short introduction, a list of five
pieces of published work with a line about each, and a way
to contact her. Quiet and text first. No images.
Before you build anything, describe back to me the sections
you are going to create, in order, and one sentence on what
each is for. Do not build it yet. Wait for me to confirm.
That third one costs you one extra exchange and regularly saves three. Reading a short plan is much faster than reading a whole page.
In plain English
- Preview:
- The version of the site only you can see, before it goes anywhere. Look at it, try it, then decide.
- Section:
- One horizontal band of a page with a single job, like an introduction, a list of services, or a contact block.
- Draft:
- The first version of anything. Its purpose is to be judged, not admired.
- Iterate:
- Make one change, look at the result, decide, repeat. That is the whole job after draft one.
The pause
Something appears. Your instinct will be to type immediately, because you have already spotted three things you dislike.
Do not. Read the whole thing first, and read it for structure rather than decoration.
Ask yourself four questions, in this order:
- Are the right sections there?
- Are they in a sensible order?
- Does each one actually do its job?
- Only then: does it look right?
The order matters because structural changes undo cosmetic ones. If you spend four rounds perfecting the colour of a section you are about to delete, you have spent four rounds on nothing. Fix the skeleton, then the skin.
Two things go wrong more often than anything else, and both are worth recognising on sight.
The first is a missing section. You described five and got four, because one of your five was a sentence buried in the middle of a paragraph rather than an item in a list. Draft one is very good at reading a numbered list and surprisingly bad at reading a hint. If something you wanted is not there, go back and look at how you asked for it before you blame the build.
The second is a section that exists but is doing the wrong job. You asked for services and got a wall of adjectives with no actual services in it. That is not a layout problem and no amount of restyling will rescue it. It is a purpose problem, and lesson 3 is the fix.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Make me a website
Output
A generic page with a large heading, a paragraph of placeholder text, three unnamed feature boxes and a contact form.
It had nothing to work with, so it produced the average of every website. Nothing here is wrong and nothing here is yours. The worst part is that you now have to describe everything you wanted anyway, only now you are arguing with an existing page instead of starting clean.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Build a one page site for Ruff Cuts, a dog grooming business in Manchester, for someone deciding whether to call. Sections in order: opening with name and location, services as a list, opening hours, a short paragraph about the owner, contact details. Warm and plain. The visitor should end up calling or emailing.
Output
A page with those five sections, in that order, named and populated for that business, with the phone number and email address easy to find.
Specificity is the only steering you have before draft one exists. Every detail you leave out is a detail it fills in with the average of everything.
Checkpoint
Answer five questions before your first prompt, then read the whole draft for structure before you change a single word of it.
What you have now
A site you can look at, that nobody else can see yet. It is not published until you ask it to be, and that is lesson 4.
What you should not do is publish this. Draft one is an argument for a shape, not a finished thing, and a web address is much harder to un-send than it is to send. Lesson 3 is how you turn the shape into the site you actually described.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4What should you decide before writing your first prompt?