We can build a clean four or five page business website in a day or two. We've also had four page websites take seven weeks. The code was the same both times. The difference was when the content showed up.
If you're about to hire someone, anyone, to build your site, the most useful thing you can do is get your material together before you call. It will save you more time than any developer can.
Why delays are almost always about content
Here's how it usually goes. The owner is excited, pays the advance, and says “I'll send everything by Monday.” Monday comes and the logo arrives as a blurry WhatsApp photo of the signboard. The about page is “you write something, you know what we do.” Photos are coming from the nephew who has the good camera. The nephew is in Pune.
Nobody is being careless. Running a clinic or a shop is a full day, and writing website text falls to the bottom of the list every evening. But a developer can't design a page around text that doesn't exist. Placeholder text gets approved by accident. Layouts get reworked when the real photos turn out to be portrait instead of landscape.
That's why on our basic business website the 1 to 2 working day delivery starts once all the content is in. It isn't us being fussy. It's the only honest way to promise a date.
The checklist
Put these in one folder. A Google Drive folder is fine. A pen drive is fine.
1. Text for every page
For a typical small site that means home, about, services, and contact. You don't need polished copy. You need facts, in your own words:
- What you do, in two or three sentences, as you'd explain it to a new customer.
- Each service or product line, with a short description. Prices if you're happy to show them.
- How long you've been running, who runs it, anything that makes people trust you.
- Timings, including the day you're closed.
Typos are fine. A developer can clean up grammar. What they can't do is guess whether you offer home visits.
2. Photos
Real ones. Your shopfront, the inside, your team, your work. A phone photo taken in daylight beats a stock image of smiling people in suits every single time, because customers can tell. Send the original files, not screenshots and not images forwarded through WhatsApp, which compresses them badly.
Shoot a few in landscape. Website banners are wide.
3. Logo
The original file if you have it: a PNG with a transparent background, or better, the SVG or AI file from whoever designed it. If all you have is a photo of the signboard, say so early. We can work with it, but it changes the plan.
4. Contact details, exactly as you want them shown
Phone, WhatsApp number (if different), email, full address with pin code, and the link to your Google Maps listing. Check that the address matches your Google Business Profile word for word. Small mismatches confuse customers and search engines alike.
5. Domain access
This one stalls more launches than anything else on the list. If you already own a domain, find out where it's registered and make sure you can log in. Not “my CA's office set it up in 2019.” Actually log in, yourself, and confirm the renewal date.
If you don't have one yet, decide the name and check it's available. Short beats clever. If people will hear it on the phone, make sure they can spell it.
6. Links and small extras
Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whatever you actually use. Skip the ones you haven't posted on since lockdown. Also any registration numbers you're expected to display, like a GSTIN or a medical registration, if they apply to you.
If you hate writing
Most people do. Try this: open the voice recorder on your phone and pretend a new customer just walked in and asked what you do. Talk for five minutes. Then send that recording, or a transcript of it, to whoever is building your site.
It works surprisingly well. People explain their business clearly out loud and terribly on paper. The spoken version has the details a customer actually cares about, like parking, or the fact that you take walk-ins, which never make it into a carefully written paragraph.
What you don't need to prepare
Colour schemes, font choices, a page-by-page sitemap, a list of features. If you have strong opinions, share them. If you don't, that's the developer's job. Send two or three websites you like the look of, even from a different industry, and a short note on why. That's plenty.
Bigger projects are a different story. If you're building something with logins, bookings or workflows, you need a proper brief, and we've written about what a good software brief looks like. For a small business site, the folder above is the brief.
One last thing
Decide who on your side says yes. One person. If the site needs approval from you, your partner and your father, budget an extra week, and tell the developer at the start so nobody is surprised.
Get the folder ready first. Then ask for the build. You'll be live before the weekend.