What to send your web designer (and what slows every project down)

Almost every website that ships late ships late for the same reason. Not design revisions, not technical problems — content. The build reaches a point where it needs your words, your photos and your logins, and everything stops until they arrive.

The fix is unglamorous: gather it all before the project starts. A morning spent on this list typically saves two to three weeks of calendar time.

1. The business facts

These appear in a dozen places across a site and in your structured data. Send them once, exactly as they should be published, character for character.

• Legal business name, and the trading name if it differs.
• The public phone number — the one you actually answer.
• The public email address you want published, if any.
• Physical address, or the service area if you have no storefront customers visit.
• Business hours, including any seasonal variation.
• Licence, insurance or certification numbers you are permitted to display.
• Links to every social profile and directory listing you control.
• Your Google Business Profile link.

2. The words

You do not need finished copy — that is often part of the service. You do need raw material, because nobody can write about your business from nothing.

• A list of your services, with what each includes and excludes.
• Your prices, or the ranges you are willing to publish, and what drives them up or down.
• The twenty questions customers ask most, with your usual answers. This is the highest-value item on the whole list — it becomes your FAQ, your service pages and your article topics.
• Why customers choose you over the nearest competitor. Two or three sentences, honestly. 'We answer the phone' is a real differentiator if it is true.
• Who you cannot help. Saves wasted enquiries for years.
• Three to five customer reviews or testimonials, with permission to publish, ideally naming a specific service.
• Your story, briefly. When you started, why, and what you have done since.

3. The pictures

• Your logo as an SVG, AI or EPS file — a vector, not a JPEG lifted from Facebook.
• A PNG of the logo with a transparent background, as a fallback.
• Your brand colours as hex codes, if you have them.
• Ten to thirty photographs of your actual work, at full resolution, straight off the phone or camera.
• One photo of you or your team, and one of your premises or vehicle.
• Any before-and-after pairs you have, shot from matching positions.

If the only logo you can find is a low-resolution JPEG with a white box behind it, say so early. Recreating a vector version is a small, cheap job when it is scheduled — and an emergency when it is discovered on launch day.

4. The access

This is the section that turns into an archaeology project if it is left until the end, because the answer is often 'my nephew set that up in 2019'.

5. The decisions only you can make

• What is the one action you want visitors to take? Call, book, quote, or buy. Pick one.
• Which three pages matter most? Effort should be unevenly distributed toward them.
• Do you need to edit the site yourself? Be honest. A CMS you never open is a cost with no return; a site you cannot update when your prices change is a different kind of cost.
• Who signs off? One person. Design by committee is the most reliable way to add three weeks to a project.
• What is the hard deadline, and why? A trade show or a season opening changes what gets prioritised.

The four things that delay almost every project

1. Photographs. Booked too late or never taken. Decide in week one whether you are shooting them yourself or hiring someone.
2. Copy that needs approval from someone who is away. Identify the approver before the project starts, not after the draft is ready.
3. Domain access nobody has. Sometimes takes weeks to recover through a registrar's identity process.
4. A scope change halfway through. 'Could we also add online booking?' is a reasonable question and a different project. Ask it at the start or park it for phase two.