Web design template for client intake: 24 fields and a 9-field blocking core
Copy a 24-question web design template for client intake, keep the mandatory core at 12 fields, budget the client's typing time, and audit any form with a 30-point score.
Kristian Hoffmann
SaaS founder and operator
A web design template for client intake is a fixed set of roughly two dozen questions, ordered so the nine answers that block your first design decision sit at the front and everything else can arrive later. Most downloadable templates get the question list about right and the ordering wrong: budget and "tell us about your brand" open the form, while the page inventory and the name of the person who signs off appear on page three — after the client has stopped typing.
Below is a template you can copy field for field, the arithmetic for deciding how long it is allowed to be, and a 30-point audit you can run against whatever form you already send.
The 24 questions, grouped by what each one unblocks
Group the fields by the decision they release, not by topic. A client answers faster when consecutive questions belong to the same mental context, and you can cut a whole group when a project type does not need it.
A. Identity and access (5)
1. Company name, plus the one-sentence description you want a stranger to repeat back. 2. Primary contact: name, email, and the hours they actually answer. 3. Approver: who signs off if the primary contact is away? One name, one email. 4. Project type: new site, relaunch, single landing page, shop, or rebrand carry-over. 5. Current URL, plus any staging, intranet, or old-domain URLs still live.
B. Outcome and audience (4)
6. What has to be different 90 days after launch? One sentence. 7. What is the single action a visitor should take? Pick one, not three. 8. Which number already tells you whether that action happens, and where is it measured? 9. Name two real customer types, not personas — "practice managers at clinics with 3–10 staff" beats "modern professionals".
C. Scope anchors (5)
10. The page list: every URL you expect to exist at launch, by name. 11. Which of those pages are repeatable templates and which are one-off layouts? 12. Required functionality, as a pick-list: contact form, booking, payments, login, multilingual, search, newsletter, none of these. 13. Platform and hosting constraints: CMS, existing stack, integrations that must survive. 14. The hard date and the reason it is hard — a trade fair, a campaign, a contract end. Without a reason, it is a preference.
D. Content and assets (5)
15. Who writes the copy? A person's name and a date, not "we'll sort it out". 16. Which logo formats exist (SVG, AI, EPS, PNG) and who physically holds the files? 17. Brand colours and fonts, plus who holds the font licence. 18. Photography: existing library, stock, or a shoot to be booked? 19. Legal pages that must carry over, and who maintains their text.
E. Reference and taste (3)
20. Three sites you like, with one sentence each on what specifically — layout, typography, tone, speed. 21. Two sites you dislike, same rule. 22. What on the current site must not change, and why?
F. Process and commercials (2)
23. Budget bracket, chosen from named ranges you define, plus which bracket is a definite no. 24. Review process: how many rounds, who attends, and how feedback arrives (document, call, portal comments).
Which nine fields actually block work
Everything above is useful. Only some of it stops you from starting. Mark these nine as mandatory and let the rest stay optional, because a form that blocks submission on question 19 gets abandoned at question 19.
| # | Field | What stalls without it |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Approver | Round one has no valid sign-off, so feedback arrives from four people at once |
| 4 | Project type | You pick the wrong template and re-ask half the questions |
| 7 | Primary visitor action | Every layout decision becomes a matter of taste |
| 10 | Page list | No sitemap, no wireframes, no estimate |
| 12 | Functionality pick-list | Forms, payments, and logins are build decisions, not design details |
| 13 | Platform constraints | You design something the existing stack cannot host |
| 14 | Hard date | You cannot say whether the scope fits before the deadline |
| 15 | Copy owner | Layout gets built around lorem ipsum and breaks on real text |
| 24 | Review process | Rounds run open-ended and the project never formally closes |
A working rule: keep the mandatory count at twelve or below. The nine above plus contact, current URL, and budget bracket reach exactly twelve. Every field you make mandatory beyond that trades a slightly better brief for a materially higher chance of an empty submission.
The three-answer test for killing dead fields
A field where "yes", "no", and "flexible" are all acceptable answers changes no design decision. That is the fastest way to find dead weight in an inherited template.
Run each question through it. "Do you have a budget in mind?" fails — every answer is acceptable and none is usable. "Which of these three brackets is a definite no?" passes, because each answer removes options. "Do you like minimal design?" fails. "Between these two reference sites, which one would you defend to your board?" passes.
Typical casualties in downloaded templates: *Tell us about your company*, *What are your goals?*, *Any other comments?*, *Do you have brand guidelines?* The first three produce paragraphs you will not act on. The fourth produces "yes" — rewrite it as question 16 above, which asks for formats and a file holder.
What 24 questions cost the client in minutes
Before you send a template, price it in the client's time. This is a rough model, not a measurement, but it is specific enough to decide with.
| Field type | Count | Time each | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short text (names, emails, URLs) | 8 | 20 s | 2 min 40 s |
| Pick-one or multi-select from named options | 5 | 15 s | 1 min 15 s |
| One-sentence written answer | 7 | 45 s | 5 min 15 s |
| Named list (pages, integrations) | 2 | 4 min | 8 min |
| Reference with reason (3 likes, 2 dislikes) | 2 | 4 min | 8 min |
| Total | 24 | — | ≈ 25 min |
Twenty-five minutes of typing is a single sitting for a motivated client. Then add uploads: locating a logo folder, exporting it, and uploading it runs about three minutes per asset group, and a normal project has three groups (brand files, photography, existing copy or legal text). That pushes the same form past 34 minutes, which is where a browser tab gets left open on a Friday afternoon and never returns.
So split it. Written intake first, at around 25 minutes. Assets in a second pass, after the kickoff call, when the client knows exactly which files matter. Two short tasks finish more reliably than one long one, and the asset pass is the one where you can name formats precisely.
PDF, Word, Excel, form, or portal
The related searches for this keyword are dominated by format — PDF, free download, Excel. The format matters less for the questions than for what happens to the answers afterwards.
| Format | Respondent needs an account | Where the files land | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fillable PDF | No | Email attachments | Someone prints, handwrites, and scans it — you retype everything |
| Word or Docs file | Usually no to view, sometimes yes to edit | Email or a shared drive | Three copies exist, two are named "final" |
| Excel or Sheets | Usually no to view | Same as above | Long-form answers do not get written into a cell |
| Hosted form builder | Usually no | The builder's own storage | One submission only — the client cannot finish later or add the logo next week |
| Client portal link | No | Brief and files in one project record | Overhead is hard to justify if you run two projects a year |
The deciding criterion is not convenience during filling, it is what you can extract afterwards. If the answers cannot leave the tool as structured text you paste straight into a scope document, you pay the retyping cost on every project. Portals built for this handoff — cluein.me works this way — give the client one link with no account and hand you the brief plus the uploaded files as a single structured export. A PDF gives you a PDF.
A 30-point audit for any intake template
Score the template you currently send, 0–5 in each category. This takes about ten minutes and is worth repeating whenever you inherit a template from a previous studio.
1. Answerability — every field passes the three-answer test. 2. Blocking discipline — twelve or fewer mandatory fields, each mapped to a decision that genuinely stalls. 3. Asset capture — every asset question names the format, the source, and the person holding the file. 4. Decision rights — one named approver, a counted number of rounds, a named feedback channel. 5. Scope anchors — a page list by name, a functionality pick-list, and a date with a reason attached. 6. Exportability — answers leave the tool as text you can paste into a scope document without retyping.
Reading the score: 24 and above, send it as is. Between 18 and 23, send it but budget a kickoff call to fill the specific gaps you scored low on. Below 18, the form is collecting information you cannot act on — rebuild the mandatory twelve before you touch the optional fields. The page list is the seam between intake and estimating, so if you scored low on scope anchors, fix that first and carry the output into a web design scope document template that turns those page names into countable deliverables.
Where intake templates fail in practice
The failure is rarely a missing question. It is a question that returns an unusable answer, and you only notice three weeks later.
The logo arrives as a JPEG in a Word document. This happens whenever the asset field says "upload your logo" without naming formats. The fix is question 16: ask which formats exist and who holds them, then request those specific files in the asset pass.
Feedback comes from four people. No named approver means round one produces contradictory notes and round two re-litigates round one. State the rule out loud: a round starts when the named approver sends consolidated feedback, and consolidating is their job, not yours.
One template covers every project type. A shop and a landing page share maybe half their intake fields. Sending shop questions to a landing-page client signals that the form was not written for them, and they answer accordingly.
The client fills in 60% and stops. Almost always at an upload field or an open essay field. That is a design problem in the form, not a discipline problem in the client — check where the abandoned submissions cluster and cut or defer whatever sits at that position.
Per-project-type variants
Keep the 24 fields as the base and swap groups C and D by project type. A small library of three variants covers most studio work, and a web design project template library is easier to maintain than one form with conditional logic branching six ways.
Landing page: replace the page list with the single offer, the traffic source, the form fields and where submissions go, and what the visitor sees after submitting.
Shop: add SKU count, variant structure, the payment and shipping providers already contracted, tax handling, and the platform being migrated from — including whether product data can be exported.
Rebrand carry-over: add which assets are locked by the new brand, who holds the font licence, which URLs must keep their addresses, and what explicitly gets retired.
If you want a longer discovery instrument for bigger engagements rather than a fast intake form, the briefing template for designers runs 32 prompts and covers positioning and competitive context that this 24-field version deliberately skips.
Questions worth answering before you send anything
Where do free intake templates come from, and are they enough? Form builders and document-template galleries publish web design intake templates you can copy, and several are perfectly serviceable as a starting field list. Two cautions: check the provider's own current terms before you rely on a free tier for client data, and expect to cut about a third of the fields, because gallery templates are written to look thorough rather than to be finished. Copying the 24 fields above into a tool you already pay for is usually faster than adopting someone else's form wholesale.
Should the form go out before or after the first call? Send the twelve mandatory fields before the call and the remaining twelve after. A call spent reading out contact details and page names is a wasted call; a call spent arguing about which single visitor action matters is the call you actually wanted. The reference questions in group E in particular work better after a conversation, because the client has heard you explain what you are looking for.
What do you do when half the form comes back empty? Look at which half. Empty optional fields are fine — that is the point of making them optional. An empty mandatory field means either the question failed the three-answer test or the client genuinely does not know yet, and those need different responses. If they do not know who approves, that is the first thing to resolve, before any design work starts. If they do not know their page list, offer two or three named structures and let them pick, rather than asking again in the same words.