What to prepare before a website project starts — the list that saves two weeks
Website projects rarely run late for technical reasons. They run late because we have been waiting three weeks for the service descriptions, the team photos, or the password to a domain registered by someone who no longer works at the company. The list below is everything I will ask for at the start anyway — gather it earlier and the project simply gets shorter.
Author: Bartosz Gonta
1. Copy — the usual bottleneck
Text is the one part of a project nobody can write for you without knowing your business. It helps to have ready:
- a description of every service you want to sell — two or three paragraphs each,
- a short note about the company and about the person the customer will deal with,
- answers to the questions customers ask most often (that is a ready-made FAQ section and free SEO content),
- prices or ranges, if you want to show them.
It does not have to be polished marketing copy. Raw sentences in your own words are better material than smooth text that says nothing specific.
2. Photos and a logo, in the originals
The biggest problem is rarely a lack of photos. It is photos pulled off Facebook or sent through a messenger — compressed beyond recognition and useless on a large screen.
What is needed are the source files: photos straight from the camera or phone, and the logo in vector form (SVG, AI, EPS). A PNG logo with a background can only be used in one place and on one colour.
Stock photos beat bad photos of your own, but lose to good ones. On local business websites a real photo of the team and the premises does more for trust than all the other graphics put together.
3. Access — check it before it is needed
This is the item that can block a launch on the final day. Work out in advance who has access to:
- the domain panel (the registrar, not the hosting — often two different companies),
- the hosting for the current site, if one exists,
- the mailbox on the domain,
- the Google Business Profile listing,
- analytics and ad accounts, if an agency used to run them.
If any of those sits on the personal account of a former employee or a previous agency, recovering it can take longer than building the site.
4. One decision-maker and a list of competitors
A project moves fastest when one person collects and passes on the feedback. Three people sending contradictory comments is not an admin problem — it doubles the timeline.
It also helps to have three or four websites you like, with one sentence on why, and one you dislike. That last one is often more useful than all the others: it narrows the direction faster than a long conversation about style.
5. What should happen after someone lands on the site
The question sounds trivial and it decides the layout of the whole site. A phone call? A form? A booking? An order? Each of those answers produces a different home page.
Decide too how you will measure success after three months — in enquiries, calls or bookings. Without that the only measure left is “I like it”, which is a poor criterion for a sales tool.
Have most of this list already? Write briefly what you do and what the site should achieve — I'll send a free quote within 48 hours.
Have a project in mind? Describe it briefly — I reply personally, usually within 24 hours.
