Discovery is where we find out what the site is for before anyone decides how to build it. We ask; we do not assume. It ends as one page, in your words, that you read back and correct before it counts.
What are the eight questions?
What is it. Who is it for. How will people find it. How does it make money. Where does it live. What does it connect to. What exists already. What are the constraints.
They are answered by asking you, not by guessing from your current site. The answers settle things you would otherwise never see argued about: whether pages are built to be found by search engines and AI assistants, or sit behind a login; what the site plugs into; what “done” looks like in one sentence.
Why do we ask who holds your domain, hosting and email?
Because launches fail there, not in the design. Before any technical decision we find out who controls the domain registration, the DNS, the current host, where email is routed, analytics, and any third-party service the site depends on. We ask whether you can actually grant access to each, and how long a change takes through whoever holds it. An IT department with a five-day turnaround moves the launch date, and it is better to know that in week one.
If something the launch needs cannot be granted, that is a stop, not a note in the margin. The custody note records who holds what. It never records a password.
What is the ninth question?
If your site collects anything, a contact form, a booking, an account, we ask what personal data it collects, where it goes, who processes it, and how long it is kept. That feeds the data processing agreement you will sign before launch, and it names the destination every form is tested against on the day.
What does the one-page intent look like?
Six headings. The problem. The proposed outcome, with one sentence that says what success is. What is out of scope. Who and what is affected. Constraints. Open questions.
It is written in your words, not ours. If you said “the phone needs to ring more”, the intent says that, not “increase inbound conversion”. You read it back and correct anything we got wrong. Open questions may stay open; none may be silently assumed. Once you have corrected it and Richard has closed it, that page is what every later step starts from.
What if the site is a rebuild?
Every address on the old site is listed with where it goes on the new one, so nothing that ranks today returns a dead page at launch. That list is written here, because it depends on what exists now, and it is checked on launch day.