Build a brand new $10,000 website for your business using AskEleven

What you are building, and how this works

You are going to run the same process a good agency runs, with your AskEleven Employee doing the production work and you doing the judging. The division of labor matters. Your Employee drafts, structures, and revises quickly and without ego. You decide what is true about your business and what feels right. Neither of you should do the other's job.

The sequence is fixed: discovery first, then sitemap, then copy one page at a time, then design direction, then revisions, then launch. Resist the urge to skip ahead. Every step feeds the next, and the single most common way these projects go generic is starting with design before anyone has decided what the site needs to say.

Each prompt below is written to be pasted verbatim, with bracketed parts for you to fill in. Paste them into a chat with your Employee one at a time, read what comes back, and do not move on until you would put your name on it.

Before you start: gather four things

One short session of collecting, before any prompting. Everything else in this guide goes faster and comes out better if these four things exist in one folder your Employee can see.

• Your brand assets. Logo files (the real ones, not a screenshot), any brand colors you already use, photos of your business, your team, and your work. If you have a one-line description you already use on invoices or social profiles, include it. Do not worry if this is thin; discovery will fill the gaps.
• Your offer, written plainly. One paragraph per service or product: what it is, who it is for, what it costs or how pricing works, and what happens after someone says yes. Bullet points are fine. Marketing language is not required and is actually worse here - the Employee will write that part.
• Three competitor sites. The URLs of three businesses you compete with or admire. For each, one sentence on what they do well and one on where they fall short. These give your Employee a concrete quality bar and a map of what to avoid sounding like.
• Your best customer, described. Think of one real customer you wish you had ten more of. Write a short paragraph: who they are, how they found you, what they were worried about before buying, and what they said afterward. This one paragraph will shape more of the final copy than anything else you provide.

Put all of it in a folder in your shared workspace, or paste it into the chat when the discovery prompt asks for it. Fifteen minutes of gathering here saves hours of vague revisions later.

Step 1: The discovery prompt

Discovery is an interview, and your Employee conducts it. The prompt below sets that up explicitly: it forbids jumping to output and forces the questions a good strategist would ask. Paste it, then answer honestly and specifically. Short real answers beat long polished ones.

What to expect: a genuine interview, one question at a time. Good questions will be uncomfortable in a useful way - "what do customers actually say when they refer you" is harder and more valuable than "what services do you offer." If the questions feel like a form, tell it to push harder.

When the interview ends, ask for the write-up:

What to expect: a brief you could hand to any writer or designer. Read it critically. If any line makes you think "that is not quite us," fix it now, in the brief, by telling your Employee what is off. Every page of copy will inherit whatever you let stand here.

Step 2: The sitemap prompt

Now decide what pages exist and what job each one does. Most small-business sites need five to eight pages. More is not better; every extra page is another thing to keep honest and up to date.

What to expect: typically a homepage, one page per major service (or one combined services page), an about page, and a contact page - plus, where it earns its place, a page of work, results, or testimonials. Push back on anything speculative. A blog you will not write and a resources page with nothing in it are liabilities on day one. Approve the sitemap explicitly before moving on: "approved, these pages, these slugs."

Step 3: Copy, one page at a time

Write pages one at a time, in order of importance, starting with the page flagged in step 2. One page per prompt keeps quality high and revisions cheap. Use this prompt for each page, filling the bracket:

What to expect: complete, structured copy with an honest list of guesses at the bottom. Answer the open questions first - facts before style. Then read the copy aloud. Anywhere you stumble or cringe, quote the exact line back and say what is wrong with it: "this sounds like a brochure," "we would never say premium," "the second paragraph buries the point." Specific complaints get specific fixes.

Two quality checks worth running on every page before you accept it:

• The swap test. Could a competitor paste their name into this page and have it still be true? If yes, it is not specific enough. Send it back with one concrete detail that only your business can claim.
• The skim test. Read only the headings. Do they tell the whole story on their own? Most visitors will read nothing else.

Repeat for every page in the sitemap. Confirm each one - "this page is final" - before starting the next, so your Employee treats accepted copy as settled.

Step 4: The design direction prompt

Only now, with the words settled, does design begin. Design chosen before copy produces a pretty container for generic content; design chosen after copy serves the message. This prompt makes taste concrete instead of vague:

What to expect: one opinionated direction with reasons, not a menu. This is deliberate - three options pushes the design decision back onto you, and choosing between vague descriptions is how sites end up beige. React to the one direction the way you would to a designer's presentation: "warmer," "less corporate," "the photography treatment is right, the buttons feel heavy." When the direction feels right in words, have your Employee build the first page against it and judge the real thing, then apply the settled direction to the rest.

Step 5: The revision loop

With all pages built, walk through the whole site the way a first-time visitor would, on your phone as well as your computer. Then run revisions in passes rather than one long list of mixed complaints. Three prompts, in order:

What to expect: the honesty pass usually catches two or three quiet exaggerations that crept in - fix those without mercy, since a website that overpromises writes checks your team has to cover. The last prompt's closing sentence matters more than it looks: it stops well-meant "improvements" to pages you had already accepted. Two or three focused revision rounds is normal. If you are on round six, the problem is usually upstream - reread the discovery brief and check whether it still says what you believe.

Going live: domain, hosting, launch

The finished site is a set of files until it lives at your domain. Your AskEleven Employee handles the technical steps; this section tells you what to ask for and what each step means, so you are approving rather than guessing.

Domain. If you already own your domain, you need access to wherever it is registered (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, or similar) - dig out that login now, since it is the single most common launch delay. If you do not own one yet, ask your Employee to check availability for your business name and register it; a .com runs about $10 to $20 a year.

Hosting. The site your Employee built is static files, which is good news: static hosting is fast, secure, and cheap or free on services like Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages. Ask your Employee to set up hosting, deploy the site, and confirm it loads at the temporary preview address before touching your real domain.

Pointing the domain. Connecting your domain to the new hosting is a DNS change: a couple of records updated at your registrar, which your Employee can walk you through or handle with access. Two things to know: changes can take a few hours to reach everyone, and your old site stays up until this moment - so nothing goes dark while you prepare. Have your Employee confirm the HTTPS certificate is active once the domain connects; the hosting services above issue one automatically.

The launch checklist. Before announcing anything, ask for this final pass:

What to expect: a pass/fail report and usually one or two small fixes. The redirect item matters most for an established business - it preserves the search ranking your old pages earned. When the checklist is clean, you are live.

One last habit worth keeping: the discovery brief, the sitemap, and the design direction are now standing documents. When your offer changes next year, you do not start over - you update the brief and re-run the loop for the pages it touches. That is the part of this process the $10,000 never bought you.