What to prepare before your build starts

Almost every delayed website is waiting on content, not code. Getting these together before kickoff usually saves a week.

Write a plain description of what you do, who you do it for and what makes you the sensible choice. Three paragraphs is enough to start.

Collect real photos. Ten honest pictures of your work, your team and your premises beat any stock library.

List your services with a sentence each, and decide what you are willing to publish about price — a range, a starting figure, or quote-only.

Gather logins: domain registrar, current host, Google Business Profile, social accounts and any booking or payment tools you already use.

Finally, decide who signs off. One decision-maker keeps a project moving; a committee doubles the timeline.

Work through this list in a single sitting and a build that would have taken six weeks usually takes three.

• A one-paragraph description of the business, written the way you would say it.
• Your top services, each with two or three sentences and a rough price signal.
• Ten to twenty real photos: work in progress, finished results, team, vehicles, premises.
• Your logo files, or an honest note that you do not have any.
• Five reviews or testimonials with first names and dates.
• Service areas, opening hours and how you want to be contacted.
• Registrar, hosting, Google Business Profile and social logins.
• Any legal text you must display: insurance, licences, certifications.

Content that gets stuck is almost always visual. You do not need a photographer to start: a modern phone, daylight, a clean background and a steady hand produce usable images. Shoot wide and close for each job, keep the originals at full size, and name the files so somebody else can tell what they are.

A short list of sites you dislike, and why, saves more revision rounds than a list of sites you like. "Too corporate", "too busy", "I never want a sliding banner" are all useful instructions and take thirty seconds to write.

Every extra approver adds a week. Nominate one person who can say yes, agree a review turnaround of two working days, and gather everyone else's comments into that one person's reply. This single habit is the strongest predictor of a project landing on time.

Do not try to write like a brochure. Record yourself answering three questions out loud — what do you do, who is it for, why should someone choose you — then type up what you said and tidy it. The result reads like a person, which is what customers respond to, and it takes twenty minutes rather than three weeks of avoidance.

Agree the list of pages before anyone designs anything. A typical service business needs a home page, a page per main service, an about page, a proof page for reviews or past work, a contact page and the legal pages. Adding pages mid-project is where timelines slip, so it is worth an hour of arguing about the list up front.

Business name and registration details, insurance and licence numbers if you display them, your cancellation and refund terms, and how you handle customer information. None of this is exciting, and all of it is quicker to collect now than in the final week when everything else is ready.

Plan for a quiet launch rather than a big one: check every form, every link and every phone-sized layout, then tell customers once it is stable. Keep the old site reachable until the new one is confirmed working, redirect the old addresses, and give it a fortnight before judging anything. Sites settle, and the first week of numbers never means what people think it means.