So a buddy of yours wants to pick your brain because they need to build a website for something.

Awesome. It’s nice to feel useful.

Let’s say the goal of the conversation is to get closer to making actual choices on what technologies to use. Where are you going to host it? What is the main site-building tool, if any? Where are you going to buy a domain name, if anywhere? What additional tools are needed?

I’m not going to help you answer those questions, but having a list of questions might be helpful. You probably know your answers, based on what you hear from your friend anyway.

• What is the main goal of having this website? If people visiting it did the one thing you wanted them to do, what is that one thing?
• Is eCommerce involved? Or a user account system? If this is a yes, this is a big one and affects many other choices, so you should know this up-front. Is it a digital product, physical, or both? If physical, is there an inventory? Where is that inventory? Do you need to keep track of it? Who is shipping it? Do the shippers have software requirements? If it’s an account system, are they paying for that account? What does having an account allow them to do?
• What’s the budget? (Another big one to know upfront as it can guide everything.)
• How often does the site need to be updated?
• Will you be publishing new content to the website or just updating existing? Is there a blog?
• Who do you expect to do those updates? Does that person need a CMS experience to manage things? Is the update person comfortable with HTML & CSS or do they need something more like a WYSIWYG?
• Is there established branding? Or is that being invented at the same time?
• How unique does it need to be? Does a template or slightly altered template sound OK or are you looking for a fresh hand-crafted design?
• Are there any SEO goals or expectations?
• How involved do they want to be in creating and maintaining the website?

There are a lot of ways to build websites, from essentially free (besides labor) to incredibly expensive. If you knew all these things, you could likely guide them to reasonable solutions.