What to Prepare Before You Order a Website

Most website projects that run late are not late because of the developer.

They are late because week three arrives and nobody has written the text. Or because the logo only exists as a JPEG someone screenshotted from Instagram. Or because two people at the client have quietly different ideas about what the site is for, and neither has said so out loud.

None of this is anyone's fault exactly. You are hiring someone to build a website because building websites is not your job — so nobody told you what to have ready. Here is that list.

1. One sentence saying what the site is for

Not the business. The site.

"Get enquiries from people searching for us." "Let existing customers book without calling." "Explain what we do so the sales team stops repeating themselves." One of those. Pick one.

This sounds trivial and it is the single highest-leverage thing on this list. Every decision downstream — layout, structure, what goes on the homepage, what gets cut — is answered by this sentence. Without it, every decision becomes a matter of taste, and taste has no stopping condition. You will go around in circles on button colours because there is nothing to test the button against.

If two people in your company would write different sentences here, sort that out before you talk to anyone. It is much cheaper to disagree now than in week six.

2. Your text, or a decision about who writes it

This is the number one cause of stalled projects. By a wide margin.

The design gets done. The build gets done. And then the site sits at 90% for two months because nobody has written the About page. Meanwhile the developer has moved on to other work, and when your text finally arrives, so does a queue.

Two honest options:

You write it. Rough is fine — genuinely. Nobody expects polish. Bullet points that say what you actually do beat a beautiful paragraph that says nothing. It can be edited later; it cannot be invented from nothing.

You pay someone to write it. Then say so at the start and budget for it, because it is real work and it is not usually included by default.

What does not work is "we'll sort the text out later". Later is week nine and the project is dead in the water.

3. Your logo as an actual file

Not a JPEG. Not a screenshot. Not a PNG with white corners that will look wrong on every dark background.

You need the vector file — .svg, .ai, .eps, or .pdf. Whoever designed the logo has it. Email them; they will send it in five minutes.

If nobody has it and the original designer is unreachable, say so early. Redrawing a logo from a low-resolution image is a small job, but it is a job, and finding out in week five is worse than knowing on day one.

While you are at it: your brand colours as hex codes, and the name of your font if you have one. If those do not exist, that is a fine answer — it just means someone will decide them, and it should be a decision rather than an accident.

4. Photographs, or the acceptance that you will use stock

Real photos of your actual work, your actual premises, your actual people are the single strongest trust signal a small business website has. They are the thing a competitor cannot copy and a fake company cannot produce.

Stock photography is the opposite. Everyone recognises it now. A diverse team laughing at a laptop tells the visitor exactly one thing: this company had nothing real to show.

So: do you have photos? Can you take some? A phone camera in decent light beats stock, every time, without exception. If the answer is genuinely no, then use stock — but choose it deliberately, knowing what it costs you, rather than defaulting into it in week seven.

5. Three sites you like and, more usefully, why

Everyone brings examples. Almost nobody explains them, and the unexplained ones are useless.

"I like this site" tells the designer nothing. You might mean the layout, the colours, the tone of the writing, the photography, the way the navigation works, or the fact that the company is successful and you want that. Those are six different briefs.

So for each example, one line: "I like how this explains their pricing without a table." "I like that this feels calm — ours is too loud." "I like this navigation, it's obvious where things are."

Bring two or three you dislike as well, with reasons. Knowing what to avoid is worth as much as knowing what to aim for, and people are usually clearer about it.

6. Who decides

If three people have to approve every screen, say so on day one. It is not a problem — it just changes the schedule, and the schedule should reflect it.

What breaks projects is the surprise decider. The design is approved, the build is half-finished, and then a business partner sees it for the first time and hates the whole direction. Now you are paying to redo work that was already signed off, and everyone is unhappy.

Decide before the project starts: who gives feedback, who has final say, and how fast can they turn things around. If your final approver is unreachable for the two weeks in the middle of the project, that is a two-week delay and it is better to plan for it than discover it.

What you do not need

To save you worrying:

• You do not need to know what it should be built with. That is the studio's job to explain, not yours to specify.
• You do not need a sitemap. If you have one, great. If not, it will come out of the first conversation.
• You do not need final text. Rough text now beats perfect text in two months.
• You do not need to know what it should look like. You need to know what it should do. The looking-like part is what you are paying for.

The short version

Before you contact anyone, have: one sentence about the site's purpose, rough text or a plan for getting it, your logo as a vector, an honest answer about photos, three examples with reasons, and a decision about who decides.

That is an afternoon. It is also the difference between a project that ships in six weeks and one that limps into month four — and it does more for the outcome than choosing between a freelancer, a studio, or an agency, which is the decision most people agonise over instead.

We're DAKER, a web design and development studio in Baku working with startups and small businesses across Europe. We'll walk through all of this with you on a call before anyone talks about money — and if it turns out you're not ready to start yet, we'll tell you that too. Get in touch.