What to prepare before work on your website starts

Before I start building your site, I need five things from you: copy about what you do, photos, a logo, access to your domain and hosting if you already have them, and one person who makes the decisions. When that is ready at the start, the site is finished in 2–4 weeks. When it is not, that deadline easily doubles.

The programming rarely runs late. The materials do — and almost always the copy.

Copy — this is where the time goes

You do not have to write like a marketing agency. I need, in plain words, what you already tell clients on the phone:

• What exactly you do — a list of services, one or two sentences each.
• Who you work for — your typical client and what they come to you with.
• Why you and not someone else — years of experience, a guarantee, call-outs, opening hours. Anything concrete.
• The basics — full company name, address, phone, opening hours, whatever belongs in the footer.

Send it however is easiest — a Word file, an email, a message. I cut it down, tidy it and spread it across the pages. But I cannot invent what you do.

The worst case is "you write a draft and I will look at it". Then I write assumptions, you correct them, and we lose two weeks on something you could have dictated in half an hour.

Photos — fewer than you think

A marketing site typically needs between eight and fifteen photos. Not a hundred.

• The premises — outside and inside, in daylight.
• You and the team — one decent photo per person.
• The work or the product — what the client actually gets.

A phone is enough if the light is good. Send originals, not versions that have been through WhatsApp or Viber — those are shrunk and look blurry on a large screen. If you have no photos, that is a separate job and we agree it up front.

Domain, hosting and logo

If you already have a domain, I need access to the account it is registered in — not just the name of it. If you do not know where it lives, ask whoever built your last site or set up your email. That can take days, so it is better checked on day one than on the last day.

The domain and the hosting should be in your name and your company's. If they are in somebody else's, you are not formally the owner of your own site and you cannot change supplier without negotiating.

Send the logo in the largest version you have, ideally a vector — a file ending in .svg, .ai, .eps or .pdf. If all you have is a small image pulled off Facebook, tell me straight away so we sort it out at the beginning.

One person who decides

It sounds like a detail until it happens. If four people from the company comment on the design and each has their own opinion, I cannot decide for you.

Agree up front who that person is. Let them collect everyone else's comments and send me one list of changes. A round of revisions then takes a day instead of a week.

What you do not have to prepare

You do not have to know how the site should look. You do not have to pick colours, fonts or the order of the sections. You do not have to understand hosting, SEO or any word ending in "-js". That is my part of the job.

If there is a site you like — anyone's, in your trade or from abroad — send the link and tell me what you like about it. That helps me more than a formal brief.

What next

If you are planning a site, see what the build covers and then write to me with a short description of the job. I will tell you which materials you already have and which are missing, before you pay for anything.

Frequently asked

What if I have none of this? Then we start with a conversation. I can write the copy from what you dictate, and photography is arranged separately. Just count on it adding to the timeline and to the price.

Can I send the materials in pieces? You can, but the design does not start until I have the copy for at least the home page. An empty frame cannot be designed honestly.