What to Prepare Before Your Website Build Starts
Most website projects stall not because the code is complex or the design is difficult. They stall because the client didn’t know what to have ready before work started. Here’s what actually helps.
The brand assets that unlock everything
Your logo is the first thing we need, and we need it in a proper vector format: .svg or .ai file, ideally. Not a screenshot clipped from your Facebook banner, not a JPEG exported at 72px. If you only have a low-resolution version, say so upfront and we’ll figure out the best path forward.
Alongside the logo: your brand colours with hex codes if you have them, and your fonts. If a designer built your branding at some point, they should have supplied a simple brand sheet. Dig it out. If your brand was never properly formalised, which is true for plenty of established businesses, that’s also fine to acknowledge upfront. We can work with what exists, or we can flag where consistency is worth addressing before we build. Either way, knowing where you stand before day one means we don’t lose a week tracking files down mid-project.
If you have no brand assets at all, don’t let that block the conversation. We’ve started from less. Our post on brand identity for small businesses covers why consistency matters, but it needn’t be a prerequisite for talking to us.
Copy: the single biggest reason projects run late
More website projects stall over content than anything else. Not design decisions, not technical requirements, words. Specifically, the absence of them.
You need copy for every page: home, services, about, contact at minimum. If you’re having a full site built, that can mean several thousand words of content that needs to exist before we can properly structure and design around it. The sooner you know this is coming, the better.
The core question: are you writing it, or are we? Both work. You know your business better than anyone; we can shape tone and hierarchy once your draft comes in. Alternatively, we can handle it through our content service, which means fewer round-trips and one less thing on your plate. What doesn’t work is treating copy as a “sort it out later” item and expecting it to slot neatly into a finished design. The words and the structure are inseparable.
If you’re writing your own, skip the mission-statement language. Nobody reads “we are a passionate, dedicated team committed to delivering outstanding results” and thinks: that’s the one. Write the way you’d explain your service to someone you’ve just met at a networking event. What problem does your customer have? What do you do about it? What happens when they contact you? That’s your copy.
A few prompts that tend to unlock useful material:
- What does a customer usually assume about you that’s actually wrong?
- What do you do that competitors quietly skip?
- What does a typical first conversation with a new client actually sound like?
For one-page sites specifically, our post on how to write copy for a one-page website has a practical structure you can work through.
Photography: real images do what stock can’t
Good photography converts better than stock, not because stock is always bad, but because real images are evidence. A photo of your actual work, your actual team, your actual premises tells a visitor that a real business exists. That signal matters more than most people realise when a stranger is deciding whether to pick up the phone.
If you have photographs of your work, your space, or your people, gather them before the project starts. Export them at full resolution from wherever they’re stored; don’t resize or compress them yourself, because we’ll handle web optimisation. Even decent phone photos can work well on a modern site, we’ll tell you honestly if anything isn’t usable.
Stock photography has its place for service businesses with nothing obvious to photograph: consultants, financial advisers, certain kinds of agencies. Chosen carefully, it can carry a page without looking generic. But if you have real photos and don’t use them, you’re leaving trust signals on the table. The link between authentic imagery and enquiry rate shows up consistently in conversion work, it’s one of several practical points covered in our post on building trust fast on your website.
Examples of sites you like, and sites you hate
We ask every client for three to five websites they like and three they actively dislike. The dislikes are at least as useful as the likes.
Sites you admire communicate aesthetic preferences, layout instincts, and what you associate with credibility. Sites you can’t stand are often more precise as creative direction: “I hate how busy that feels” or “why does everything animate as you scroll” gives us sharper guidance than “I want something clean and modern.”
They don’t need to be from your industry. A solicitor who loves how a luxury hotel brand presents itself is telling us something useful about visual restraint and whitespace. A heating engineer who sends three trades sites they hate tells us exactly what to avoid. Save any URL you come across where your instinct is “why can’t mine look like that.” That URL is part of your brief.
Goals and the one action you want visitors to take
Every page we build is in service of a primary action. Before the project starts, be clear about what that action is. Form submission? Phone call? Online booking? The call to action on the page, the structure of the content, the information hierarchy, all of it derives from this single question.
Who you’re trying to reach is the other half. A sole-trader plumber targeting homeowners in Staffordshire needs a different tone and different trust signals than a B2B logistics firm targeting operations managers. Neither is complicated to work with, but they’re distinct. Have a picture of your best customer in mind, not a fictional persona with a made-up name, just the person you most want on the end of the phone.
If Google search is part of how customers find you now, say so. Search structure is built into every site we produce from the first line of code; it’s not a bolt-on or an optional extra. But knowing where your leads come from today helps us prioritise the right elements for day one.
Practical admin: domain, email, existing hosting
A few logistical items have a habit of slowing projects down when they surface at the wrong moment.
Find your domain login before we start. Whether your domain is registered with GoDaddy, 123-reg, Namecheap, or a previous web designer’s account, you’ll need access at some point during the build. If a former designer holds the domain, start that conversation now, transferring a domain can take longer than expected and occasionally delays go-live.
If you have an existing site, note where it’s hosted and who manages it. For redesign projects, we need access to the existing structure to handle redirects properly and maintain search continuity. The more you can document before we begin, the less mid-project chasing happens.
Check your email setup too. Business email addresses are usually separate from web hosting, but migrations can cause problems if we don’t know what’s there. Tell us whether you’re on Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or something else. It takes thirty seconds to confirm and removes a common risk.
If you’re not fully ready yet
None of this needs to be in a tidy folder before you contact us. Some clients arrive with everything documented and compressed into a shared drive; others have a logo on a business card and a clear sense of what they want to achieve. Both are workable starting points.
What helps is knowing in advance what you’ll need to produce, so it doesn’t create delays once work is underway. A project that stalls waiting for copy costs you the time between now and the moment your site starts bringing in enquiries, and that’s the only metric that matters. Most of the preparation above can be completed in a focused afternoon.
If you’re still weighing up whether now is the right time to invest at all, our post on the ROI of a good website is worth reading first.
Ready to get started? Tell us what you are trying to build on our contact page and we’ll reply within one working day.