A straightforward business website takes us two to three weeks to build. Ask around, though, and you will hear about projects that ran for six months. The gap between those two numbers is almost never engineering.
The real timeline
Here is where the time actually goes on a typical build:
| Stage | Working days | Who is blocking |
|---|---|---|
| Scope and structure | 2–3 | Both of us |
| Design of key pages | 3–4 | Us, then your approval |
| Build | 5–7 | Us |
| Content loading | 1–2 | You |
| Review and corrections | 2–3 | You, then us |
| Launch and checks | 1 | Us |
Add it up and the development work is about half the calendar. The other half is decisions, and decisions are what slip.
The three things that stall projects
Nobody owns approval. If four people must agree on the homepage headline and none of them is the decider, the project waits until someone forces it. Name one approver at the start. They do not have to write anything; they have to be able to say yes.
The content does not exist yet. “We will send the About text next week” is the most expensive sentence in a web project. It is rarely next week. Write it before the build starts, even badly — editing a bad draft takes an hour, and producing a first draft from nothing takes a fortnight of avoidance.
Photographs. Everyone underestimates this. If you need pictures of your premises, products or staff, book the shoot in week one. Stock photography is a poor substitute for a business whose credibility rests on being real and local.
What we do about it
We ask for your content before we start building rather than after, and we give you a written date at the point of scoping. If something threatens that date we tell you early, while there is still room to do something about it — not on the morning it slips.
If your content genuinely is not ready, that is a normal situation and worth saying out loud. We would rather start two weeks later than run a project that sits at ninety per cent for a month.