Guide
What every good prompt includes
The ten things to say, in the order that stops an agent guessing.
Difficulty: beginner
1. Say what the website is for
Start with the result you want, not the pages you think you need. The agent uses this to decide everything else.
I want more people to order a birthday cake from my bakery without phoning me.
2. Say what the business is
One or two sentences. Include anything unusual, because that is what stops the site looking like every other site.
Fenwick Bakery, a two person bakery in Sheffield. We make custom celebration cakes to order, nothing off the shelf.
3. Say who visits and what they care about
Name the person and what they are worried about. This changes the words the agent writes more than anything else you say.
Parents ordering a childrens birthday cake two weeks ahead. They want to see photos of real cakes and know the price before they commit.
4. Say what pages or sections you need
List them in order, top to bottom for one page, or as a list of pages. Do not describe how they look yet.
One page. Header, photos of past cakes, how ordering works, prices, order form, contact details.
5. Say what goes in each one
This is where most prompts fail. Name the actual content, otherwise the agent invents it and you get placeholder text you have to rewrite.
The ordering section explains the three steps: choose a design, agree a price, pay a deposit. Prices start at 45 pounds for a six inch cake.
6. Say how it should look and feel
One short paragraph, after the structure is settled. Name colours and a mood rather than adjectives like modern, which mean nothing on their own.
Warm and homemade. Cream background, soft pink accents, a rounded serif for headings. Photos should feel like a kitchen, not a studio.
7. Say what visitors must be able to do
Capabilities, not components. "Take a deposit" is a capability. "Add a Stripe button" is you doing the agents job badly.
Visitors can send an order request with a date, a design description, and a photo they like. I get it by email.
8. Say what the agent must not do
Boundaries prevent the most expensive kind of rework, the kind where everything technically works and none of it is what you wanted.
Do not add a shop or checkout, I take payment by bank transfer. Do not change the logo. Ask me before adding anything that needs an account.
9. Say what good looks like
Quality is not automatic. If you do not ask, you often get a site that only works properly on a large screen.
It has to work well on a phone, load fast on a slow connection, and be usable with a screen reader.
10. Say what you want back right now
Asking for a plan first is usually cheaper than asking for a finished site. You find out early whether the agent understood you.
Before you build anything, show me the sections and the words you plan to use, so I can correct it.
You do not need all ten every time. A quick question needs two or three. But when a site comes back wrong, the reason is almost always that one of these was missing, and the agent filled the gap with a guess.
The order matters as much as the content. Structure before style, capabilities before components, and the deliverable last. Describe the look too early and the agent starts making layout decisions to serve an aesthetic you have not finished explaining.
One thing worth unlearning: you do not need to tell the agent to act as a senior designer. A clear outcome and a firm constraint do far more than a persona.