Build a Website Brief With ChatGPT From Real Facts
Use ChatGPT to organize facts you supply, not to discover facts about your business. The useful output is a brief that names each page, its purpose, its required content, and a test for completion. Do not ask for code yet. A brief lets you correct a missing service, an unsupported promise, or a broken contact path before those errors become a site. This guide produces that brief. The broader question of what AI can build belongs in our existing guide.
What information should you collect first?
Write a source sheet with the exact business name, approved service descriptions, service area, contact method, operating hours if public, brand assets you own, and any required legal text. Mark each item confirmed, needs approval, or unknown. Do not provide a private customer list or account credentials. Give the assistant only material you have permission to use.
Here is a fictional example, not a real business or a claim about one:
| Field | Supplied fact | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Northline Bicycle Repair | Fictional example |
| Work | Flat repair and brake adjustment | Approved for this example |
| Location | Portland, Oregon | Approved for this example |
| Contact | hello@example.com | Placeholder; replace before launch |
| Prices, hours, reviews | Not supplied | Unknown; omit |
That last row matters. A model can write plausible prices and praise. Plausible text is not approved copy. The source sheet is the authority; the chat is a drafting workspace.
What should you ask ChatGPT to make?
Paste the source sheet and this prompt into ChatGPT. OpenAI's guide to working with writing and code blocks explains that editable writing blocks may appear, but their availability depends on plan and settings. Plain chat text is enough for this task.
Act as a website information architect. Use only the facts below. Do not infer prices, hours, credentials, testimonials, service guarantees, or a phone number. Make a brief for a small static website. Give me: (1) the visitor's main task; (2) a page map with one purpose and primary action per page; (3) a content inventory that maps each supplied fact to a page; (4) an unknowns list; (5) acceptance checks that a person can perform in a browser. Label suggested wording as draft, not fact. If a fact is missing, ask for it or leave a placeholder. Here are my facts: [paste source sheet].
Do not upload a competitor's site and ask the model to copy it. You can describe a layout preference, but copy and images need their own rights. Also tell the assistant whether you need one page or several. For this example, the useful answer is a home page for services and contact, plus a separate service detail page only if the supplied descriptions justify it. A five-page map is not automatically better.
How do you turn the answer into an acceptance brief?
Review the response line by line against the source sheet. For every sentence that asserts a business fact, identify its source. Delete claims with no source. For each proposed page, check that it has one reader task and a path to the contact method. Then write the brief in this compact form:
Project: Northline Bicycle Repair (fictional)
Audience task: Find the two listed services and contact the shop.
Pages: Home (/); Services (/services/), only if the details need space.
Required copy: Name, flat repair, brake adjustment, Portland, contact email.
Required assets: Owner-supplied logo or text name. No stock review portraits.
Unknowns: Prices, hours, booking method, service radius. Do not publish them.
Acceptance: Each listed page opens; navigation reaches it; contact link opens an email draft; no unknown appears as a fact; content remains readable at narrow width.
This is an example artifact, not a brief generated in a first-hand ChatGPT session. The checks describe what a later build must prove. A builder can now estimate or implement the work without guessing what "done" means. If a page cannot be justified by a distinct task, merge it into another page.
What should you do when ChatGPT adds a claim?
Ask it to produce a claim ledger with two columns: exact sentence and source-sheet field. A blank source is a reason to remove the sentence, not an invitation to ask the model to search for support. Search can help with public background facts, but it cannot verify your own hours, prices, capacity, or customer reviews. Recheck the final copy yourself because a second model pass can still miss an invented statement.
Keep a version of the source sheet next to the accepted brief. When a business fact changes, update that sheet first and regenerate only affected copy. This preserves a clear record of what the site was allowed to say. If the example's contact address is still hello@example.com, the brief is not ready to publish.
What comes after the brief?
Choose an implementation route based on the accepted page map. For one portable page made from index.html and styles.css, continue with the static landing-page guide. For several linked pages in a new repository, use the Claude Code multi-page guide. Those guides own code and local checks. This guide ends when the brief is approved, not when a site is deployed.
If your aim is to plan changes to a site that already exists, Figment's live AI prompt-preparation tool can help frame that request. A prompt does not grant an assistant access to the site. The AI editor access page states the editor's current status. Figment's editor works on a separate imported static copy; this brief does not create or publish a site in Figment.
Sources and access date
- OpenAI, working with writing blocks and code blocks in ChatGPT, accessed 2026-09-23. Used only for the optional editing surface; the workflow also works in plain chat.
- OpenAI, creating and managing ChatGPT Sites, accessed 2026-09-23. This is a separate hosted Sites workflow, not the plain-file workflow in this series; availability depends on account and workspace.
