A straightforward small business website, say five to eight pages, takes us about six to eight weeks from deposit to launch. We could build one faster. The schedule isn’t set by how quickly we can design. It’s set by how quickly content and feedback come back, and that part sits with you.
Below is what happens each week, and what you’ll need to hand over at each stage. If you know this before you start, you can plan your own time around it and the project won’t drift into month four.
Before week 1: the quote and the brief
Before anything starts, we agree on what’s being built: the pages, the features (booking, shop, quote form), the platform, and the price. This is where scope gets locked in. Anything added later is fine, but it changes the timeline and usually the cost.
What you supply: a rough list of pages, examples of sites you like (and why), and access to your current site and domain if you have them.
Week 1: discovery
This is a working session, usually an hour or so, in person or on a call. We want to know who your best customers are, what they ask before they buy, what makes them choose you over the business down the road, and what you want people to do on the site. Call? Book? Fill in a quote form?
We also sort out the technical side early: who owns the domain, where email is hosted, and whether anything on the old site needs to be kept or redirected. Leaving this to launch week is how businesses lose their email for a day.
What you supply: logins for your domain registrar, current hosting and Google Business Profile, plus your logo files and brand colours. If you don’t have a proper logo yet, sort that first. Our guide to the logo design process explains why it’s easier to brand before you build.
Week 2: sitemap and content plan
We turn discovery notes into a sitemap (the list of pages and how they connect) and a content plan for each page: what it needs to say, roughly how many words, and which photos it needs.
This is the week to start writing. Not week five. The content plan tells you exactly what’s needed, page by page, so you aren’t staring at a blank document.
What you supply: approval of the sitemap, and a start on the words. If writing isn’t your thing, we can run an interview session and draft from that. There are more options in our article on getting website content done.
Weeks 3 and 4: design
We design the homepage first, then one inner page (usually a service page). These two set the look for everything else. You’ll see them as a working preview on a staging site, so you can check them on your own phone rather than in a static image.
You’ll get a round of feedback here, and this is where it counts most. Changing the layout of the homepage now takes an hour. Changing it after all twelve pages are built takes a day.
What you supply: consolidated feedback within a few working days. Consolidated means one list from one person. If three business partners each send separate notes that contradict each other, we have to wait for you to agree before we can do anything.
Weeks 4 to 6: build
With the design approved, we build out the remaining pages, drop in your content, set up forms, connect booking or e-commerce tools, and make sure everything works on phones. We also do the work you don’t see: page titles and descriptions, image compression, redirects from old URLs, and basic accessibility checks like contrast and heading structure.
What you supply: the final content and photos, if they aren’t in already. If your photos are a mix of old phone shots and stock images, this is when that shows. Booking a commercial photography session around week 2 means the images are ready when the build needs them.
Week 6 or 7: review
You get the full site on staging to go through properly. Click every link. Submit every form and check the email arrives. Read every page out loud, because that’s how you catch the sentence that made sense at 11pm.
We take one combined round of changes. Small fixes, wording tweaks and image swaps are all expected. A new section or a new page is a scope change, and we’ll tell you if something falls into that bucket before doing it.
What you supply: one list of changes, and sign-off.
Launch week
We move the site to live hosting, point the domain, check SSL and redirects, submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing, and set up Google Analytics. Then we test everything again on the live domain, because things that worked on staging don’t always behave the same once DNS changes.
We prefer launching early in the week. A Friday afternoon launch means any problem waits until Monday.
After launch
Every site we build comes with training, a written guide and 30 days of support, so you can make your own edits without breaking anything. The first month is when you’ll notice the small things: a phone number typo, a form going to an old inbox. Tell us and we’ll fix it.
What causes delays
In our experience, nearly every late project is late for one of four reasons. None of them are about design.
- Content. It’s always content. The site is designed and built, and three pages still say “Lorem ipsum” because nobody’s written them. Writing takes longer than anyone expects, so start in week 2.
- Approvals. A business owner who’s on the tools all day doesn’t have time to review a staging site. Block out an hour in your calendar for each review round when we book them, the same as you would a client meeting.
- Too many decision makers. Business partners, a spouse, an office manager and a cousin “who’s good with computers” all giving feedback. Pick one person who has the final say.
- Missing logins. We can’t launch until we can change the domain’s DNS. If your domain was registered by a previous web developer who’s stopped answering emails, that can take weeks to untangle through the registrar. Find out in week 1.
The decision you need to make before you start
Look at your calendar for the next two months. If you can’t find two or three hours a week for the project, either hand the writing to someone else or push the start date. A project that starts when you’re ready finishes faster than one that starts now and stalls.
Once the calendar looks workable, our web design packages lay out what’s included, and you can get in touch to pencil in a start date that fits around your busy weeks.