What happens after you say yes

The quote you chose is signed and the deposit has gone. Most people at this point expect the next thing to be a website appearing, and are surprised when the next thing is a long email asking them for a great many decisions.

Web projects rarely fail on the building. They stall in the middle, on the client’s side, over things nobody warned them about — and the supplier usually knew it was coming and did not say, because it makes for an awkward conversation at the moment someone is deciding whether to hire you.

This is that conversation, in advance: what a web designer needs from you, and roughly when. If you know it up front, a project that would have taken seven months takes seven weeks, and the difference is almost entirely preparation rather than effort.

Why projects stall in the middle rather than at either end

The start is easy because it is all decisions the supplier makes. The end is easy because everyone can see the finish line. The middle is where the work depends on things only you have: your words, your photographs, your prices, your legal text, and a decision about what the site is actually for.

That dependency is invisible in a project plan, which shows weeks of design and build and one small box called “client content”. In reality that box is the critical path for most of the schedule, and it is the only box the supplier cannot do anything about.

The second reason is that approval is slower than anyone estimates. A design sent on Friday gets looked at properly the following Wednesday, discussed with a business partner the week after, and comes back with one comment that changes the layout. Nobody did anything wrong. Three weeks went.

The four things you will be asked for

1. A decision about what the site is for

Not the design. The job. Is this site meant to make the phone ring, take payments, reduce time-wasting inquiries, or make a small business look substantial enough to be trusted with a large contract?

Those are four different websites and they disagree with each other. A site optimized to reduce time-wasting inquiries deliberately puts prices and constraints up front, which reduces total inquiries. If nobody has picked, the site quietly tries to do all four and does none well.

2. The words

Expect to be asked for text for every page, and expect that to be harder and slower than it sounds. Writing about your own business is genuinely difficult, and most people underestimate it because they know the subject so well.

Two things make it much easier. Write badly and quickly first, in a document, without thinking about the layout — editing something bad is far easier than producing something good. And answer questions rather than composing paragraphs: what do people ask you before they buy, what do they get wrong about your trade, what do you wish they knew. That is most of a website already.

3. The pictures

You will need images you have the legal right to use. Photographs taken by a photographer you paid are usually licensed rather than owned outright, so check what the license permits before assuming. Images found through a search engine are not usable, and the invoices that arrive when a rights holder notices are unpleasant.

If there is any budget at all for this, a half day with a photographer taking pictures of your actual premises, your actual staff and your actual work is the best-value line in the whole project. It is also one of the few things that makes a small business look like a real one to a stranger, which stock photography cannot do at any price.

4. The dull operational facts

Opening hours, service areas, the exact legal name of the business, the registered address, sales tax registration if you sell taxable goods, delivery and returns terms if you sell anything, and who receives the inquiries.

These sound trivial and they hold up launches constantly, because they need to be right rather than approximately right, and getting them right often means asking an accountant.

What “finished” should mean

Agree this at the start, because the two parties usually mean different things and only discover it at the end.

A reasonable definition: the site is live at your address, every page works on a phone, forms deliver to an inbox someone has tested, the old page addresses redirect to the new ones, analytics is recording, and you have the accounts and a login of your own. Anything less than that list is a site that has been handed over rather than launched.

What “finished” should not mean is perfect. A site that goes live at eighty per cent and gets corrected over the following month earns money during that month. A site held back until every detail is settled frequently misses a season, and the details that seemed urgent turn out to matter less than the ones real visitors complain about. It is worth knowing that a website is never finished in the sense that furniture is finished, which makes holding one back for perfection a poor trade.

What to do first

Before the project starts, not during it. Each of these removes two weeks from the middle.

1. Write one sentence saying what the site is for. Send it to your supplier. If you cannot write it, that is the first thing to solve.
2. Answer the three questions about what customers ask. Open a document and do not edit it. This is the raw material for most of the site.
3. Collect the images you own. Put everything you have the rights to in one folder, and note which ones you are unsure about.
4. Gather the operational facts. Check the legal name and address against your registration documents rather than memory.
5. Name one person who approves things. Tell them they are on the hook. A single decision-maker is worth more to a schedule than any amount of project management.

If you would like the questions in a form you can work through, they are the same ones we send at the start of every project, and we will send them over whether or not you end up hiring us. They are more use before you have chosen a supplier than after.

That last one matters more than it looks. Projects with two equal approvers take roughly twice as long, not because anyone is difficult, but because every decision waits for the slower diary and disagreements surface one round later than they should. Decide who has the final say before the first design arrives.

Start the document today. Twenty minutes of badly written answers to “what do customers ask me before they buy” is worth more to your project than any decision you will make about colors, and it is the only part nobody can do for you.