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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
You spend months earning the visit and a few seconds losing the enquiry.
Getting a qualified buyer as far as your contact page takes positioning, content, search and design: months of work and a real budget. Then they reach an enquiry form that wants their company size, their budget bracket, how they heard about you and whether they'll accept marketing emails. Some of them close the tab right there, and you never find out they came.
On most sites the form gets less thought than any other part, even though it's the one part that produces enquiries directly.
The buyer reads your enquiry form as a preview of working with you
Inside most firms, the form is treated as the end of the funnel: the lead is in, job done. That makes it feel like a receipt. From the buyer's side it's their first proper contact with how you operate, and they read it that way.
A form that asks for a lot before it offers anything suggests a company that will be hard work. A short form followed by a quick reply from a real person suggests the opposite. They aren't judging the form so much as sampling your process.
Each field you add loses somebody
Every extra field costs you some completions, and the people most likely to give up are the ones you most want. Senior people have the least patience and the most alternatives.
The budget dropdown is the usual offender. It gets defended as qualification, but a buyer at an early stage often doesn't know the number yet, and an honest one won't guess. Rather than commit to a figure they haven't agreed internally, many of them just leave.
A required phone number does similar damage. Plenty of people won't give their number to a company they've never spoken to, so making it mandatory trades a share of your enquiries for the convenience of being able to ring them.
"How did you hear about us?" is your own attribution reporting, and you're asking the buyer to do it at the exact moment they're deciding whether to trust you. Company size and industry are much the same: you can usually work both out from the email domain and half a minute on their website. If you could reasonably find the answer yourself, don't ask for it.
Do the qualifying above the form
The reasonable objection to short forms is that they let in enquiries you can't use. The answer is to let the words around the form do the filtering.
A few plain sentences above the form will sort people better than any dropdown. Say who you work with, what kind of project you take on and what you don't, and how a project gets scoped once you've talked. A commercial kitchen firm might write: "We design and fit out kitchens for hotels and restaurant groups. We don't take on domestic work. Every project starts with a site visit, and we scope it properly from there." Someone doing up a kitchen at home looks elsewhere, and a hotel group knows it doesn't need a budget figure ready before it gets in touch.
There's no price in that, and it doesn't need one. Some firms put a starting figure above the form as well. It filters hard, but it also fixes a number in the buyer's head before you understand the job. A clear description of the work and how you scope it does most of the same sorting. People who aren't a fit leave quietly, which is what you want.
Then ask one open question: "What are you trying to fix?" It tells you more than five structured fields would, because the length and detail of the answer show you how serious the enquiry is before you've even weighed up what it says.
If you still want budget and timeline, keep them, but make them visibly optional. Buyers who are ready will fill them in. Buyers who aren't will still get in touch, and you can qualify them in your reply.
The screen after submit needs more than a grey line
The moment after someone presses the button gets even less thought than the form itself. A grey line reading "Thank you, we will be in touch" wastes it, and for someone who has just described a problem in their business candidly to a stranger, it's a little unsettling.
Tell them when they'll hear back and from whom, by name, and make it a commitment you'll keep. A name and a time (before noon tomorrow, say) do far more work than "we'll be in touch shortly". Then give them something useful to do while they wait, like a link to book a call directly or a short note on what the first conversation will cover.
The confirmation email should do the same job. It's probably the one email from you they're actively waiting for, and most of them contain nothing but a copy of what the buyer just typed.
Speed of reply is a design decision
Response time tends to get filed as an operations matter, separate from the website. Yet it's one of the biggest factors in whether an enquiry turns into work, and the way the form is built has a lot to do with it.
If enquiries land in a shared inbox that three people half-watch, the delay is built in and good intentions won't fix it. If they arrive with the buyer's answers attached, routed to one named person who knows how quickly they're expected to answer, they get answered fast.
Someone who has enquired with you has usually sent the same message to other firms. Who replies first shapes the outcome more than most businesses like to admit.
What to check this week
This is a short audit and it doesn't need a project.
Fill in your own form on a phone, on mobile data, as if you were a stranger. Note every point of friction, and time how long the reply takes.
Count the required fields and delete any whose answer you could find yourself.
Find out where the notification actually goes and who owns it. Broken routing is more common than you'd think, and it doesn't produce an error, only silence.
Read your thank-you screen and confirmation email as someone who has just told you about a problem they need solved.
If the traffic is fine and the enquiries aren't
When a site gets healthy traffic and few enquiries, the problem is often in those last few seconds rather than anywhere earlier. On a call we'll go through your enquiry path together, from the page people land on to the reply they get, and find where it's losing them.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Ongoing site support · Discuss a brand or website project
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
You spend months earning the visit and a few seconds losing the enquiry.
Getting a qualified buyer as far as your contact page takes positioning, content, search and design: months of work and a real budget. Then they reach an enquiry form that wants their company size, their budget bracket, how they heard about you and whether they'll accept marketing emails. Some of them close the tab right there, and you never find out they came.
On most sites the form gets less thought than any other part, even though it's the one part that produces enquiries directly.
The buyer reads your enquiry form as a preview of working with you
Inside most firms, the form is treated as the end of the funnel: the lead is in, job done. That makes it feel like a receipt. From the buyer's side it's their first proper contact with how you operate, and they read it that way.
A form that asks for a lot before it offers anything suggests a company that will be hard work. A short form followed by a quick reply from a real person suggests the opposite. They aren't judging the form so much as sampling your process.
Each field you add loses somebody
Every extra field costs you some completions, and the people most likely to give up are the ones you most want. Senior people have the least patience and the most alternatives.
The budget dropdown is the usual offender. It gets defended as qualification, but a buyer at an early stage often doesn't know the number yet, and an honest one won't guess. Rather than commit to a figure they haven't agreed internally, many of them just leave.
A required phone number does similar damage. Plenty of people won't give their number to a company they've never spoken to, so making it mandatory trades a share of your enquiries for the convenience of being able to ring them.
"How did you hear about us?" is your own attribution reporting, and you're asking the buyer to do it at the exact moment they're deciding whether to trust you. Company size and industry are much the same: you can usually work both out from the email domain and half a minute on their website. If you could reasonably find the answer yourself, don't ask for it.
Do the qualifying above the form
The reasonable objection to short forms is that they let in enquiries you can't use. The answer is to let the words around the form do the filtering.
A few plain sentences above the form will sort people better than any dropdown. Say who you work with, what kind of project you take on and what you don't, and how a project gets scoped once you've talked. A commercial kitchen firm might write: "We design and fit out kitchens for hotels and restaurant groups. We don't take on domestic work. Every project starts with a site visit, and we scope it properly from there." Someone doing up a kitchen at home looks elsewhere, and a hotel group knows it doesn't need a budget figure ready before it gets in touch.
There's no price in that, and it doesn't need one. Some firms put a starting figure above the form as well. It filters hard, but it also fixes a number in the buyer's head before you understand the job. A clear description of the work and how you scope it does most of the same sorting. People who aren't a fit leave quietly, which is what you want.
Then ask one open question: "What are you trying to fix?" It tells you more than five structured fields would, because the length and detail of the answer show you how serious the enquiry is before you've even weighed up what it says.
If you still want budget and timeline, keep them, but make them visibly optional. Buyers who are ready will fill them in. Buyers who aren't will still get in touch, and you can qualify them in your reply.
The screen after submit needs more than a grey line
The moment after someone presses the button gets even less thought than the form itself. A grey line reading "Thank you, we will be in touch" wastes it, and for someone who has just described a problem in their business candidly to a stranger, it's a little unsettling.
Tell them when they'll hear back and from whom, by name, and make it a commitment you'll keep. A name and a time (before noon tomorrow, say) do far more work than "we'll be in touch shortly". Then give them something useful to do while they wait, like a link to book a call directly or a short note on what the first conversation will cover.
The confirmation email should do the same job. It's probably the one email from you they're actively waiting for, and most of them contain nothing but a copy of what the buyer just typed.
Speed of reply is a design decision
Response time tends to get filed as an operations matter, separate from the website. Yet it's one of the biggest factors in whether an enquiry turns into work, and the way the form is built has a lot to do with it.
If enquiries land in a shared inbox that three people half-watch, the delay is built in and good intentions won't fix it. If they arrive with the buyer's answers attached, routed to one named person who knows how quickly they're expected to answer, they get answered fast.
Someone who has enquired with you has usually sent the same message to other firms. Who replies first shapes the outcome more than most businesses like to admit.
What to check this week
This is a short audit and it doesn't need a project.
Fill in your own form on a phone, on mobile data, as if you were a stranger. Note every point of friction, and time how long the reply takes.
Count the required fields and delete any whose answer you could find yourself.
Find out where the notification actually goes and who owns it. Broken routing is more common than you'd think, and it doesn't produce an error, only silence.
Read your thank-you screen and confirmation email as someone who has just told you about a problem they need solved.
If the traffic is fine and the enquiries aren't
When a site gets healthy traffic and few enquiries, the problem is often in those last few seconds rather than anywhere earlier. On a call we'll go through your enquiry path together, from the page people land on to the reply they get, and find where it's losing them.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website design and build · Ongoing site support · Discuss a brand or website project
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.