How do you prepare for building a website?

The decision is made — you need a website. And in the same moment comes the feeling that a whole pile of things has to be prepared first: text about the company, photos, a logo in some correct format, and a few passwords that were written down somewhere once. The pile looks big, there is no time, and the decision gets moved to “when things calm down a bit”. Six months go by. In reality, most of that pile isn’t your work at all.

Why website projects drag on

Development is rarely the part that holds things up. A starter site is ready in about two weeks, a business site in three to five, an online store from six weeks. We fix those deadlines in the quote, and they are our responsibility.

Materials are what hold things up. Most often a project stalls on the sentence “I’ll send the texts next week”. That isn’t laziness — writing about your own company from scratch is unexpectedly hard, and squeezed between two client meetings it is never the first job on the list. The design is done, the build is done, and the site sits for a month with grey blocks of placeholder text.

And waiting costs something. Every week the site isn’t live is a week in which a customer who was looking for you found somebody else. So it isn’t in our interest to hand you homework — it’s in our interest to take it off you.

You don’t have to write the copy

We write it ourselves. We start from a conversation with you: what you do, who for, how people usually reach you, what they ask before they agree to work with you. The pages grow out of that — including the “About us” section, which is the hardest thing any business owner ever has to write.

You know the substance, we know the form. You can explain your work in ten minutes in a way you would never put down in a document. Our job is to turn that into text a customer understands in the first few seconds, and that Google and AI assistants understand too. If you already have copy or an old site — great, we use it as a basis, but none of it is a precondition for starting.

Photos and your logo

Real photos almost always work better than stock images. A picture of your premises, your team or a finished job builds trust that a bought image doesn’t — customers recognise stock photos, because they’ve seen the same one at a competitor. If there are no such photos, we tell you what would be worth shooting, or offer a solution that works without them.

The technical side isn’t your concern. Sizes, cropping, compression, formats that keep the site loading fast — we handle all of it. The same goes for the logo: if it only exists as an image from an old business card or a shop sign, it can usually be rebuilt in a clean format, and if there is no logo at all, that can be solved too.

Access credentials — the quietest hold-up

This is the part that surprises people most often. The domain is registered in a former employee’s name. The hosting sits with an acquaintance nobody is in touch with any more. The Google Business profile was created by an agency that no longer exists. The old site lives somewhere nobody is quite sure who pays the bill for.

Every one of these situations can be solved, and the place to solve them is at the start of the project, not on the day the site is meant to go live. We find out what belongs to whom, what can be taken over, what is easier to create from scratch — and move it all into your company’s name. The end result is that the domain, the hosting and the site belong to you, not to us and not to anyone else.

What is genuinely needed from you

One conversation. Half an hour in which we ask the questions and write down the answers — about your goals, your customers, and what you want a visitor to actually do: call, write, book, order. Nothing needs to be prepared beforehand, and you don’t need to know how the site should look either.

After that conversation you get a fixed quote with a price and a deadline. Then come design, development, content, launch and a short training session. Your role along the way is to approve things and to say when something isn’t what you wanted — the rest is on our side.

How we handle this

With website development, the content, the photos and sorting out access are part of the job, not something you have to hand over before we start. Prices begin at €350 for a starter site and €700 for a business site with a blog and several languages.

If it feels like you aren’t ready to start because the materials aren’t gathered — book a consultation. We’ll talk through your situation, tell you what of your existing material is usable, and take on whatever is missing.