What a web designer actually needs from you

The thing that turns a two-day website into a six-week one is almost never the build. It is waiting for the client, and it is not the client's fault, because nobody tells them what is needed until the moment it is missing.

Here is the complete list. Gather it before anyone starts and the project takes as long as the work takes.

The sentence

One sentence describing what you do and who for. Not a slogan.

We are a family-run electrical contractor working on domestic rewires and consumer unit upgrades across south Birmingham.

That is worth more than three paragraphs of "passionate about quality and customer service", and it is much harder to write than it looks. If it takes you twenty minutes, that twenty minutes is the most valuable of the project, because it decides what the homepage says in its first line, which is the line search engines and AI assistants quote.

The services, in customers' words

List the three to six things you want to be hired for. Then write next to each the words a customer would actually type.

You may call it a "consumer unit upgrade". Half your customers search for "fuse box replacement". Both should appear on the site. Trade terms make you look competent to other tradespeople; customer terms get you found by customers.

If you are not sure which phrases people use, that is a research question rather than a guess, and it is a large part of what an audit exists to answer.

The details, exactly as they should appear everywhere

Business name, address, phone number, email, opening hours.

"Exactly" is the operative word, down to the punctuation. If your Google listing says "Ltd" and your website says "Limited", and an old directory has the previous phone number, you are making search engines work to decide whether these are the same business. Sometimes they decide they are not. Consistency here is genuinely one of the cheapest local search wins available.

Write it out once, correctly, and use that version everywhere. That principle is Provenance in our specification: hold the facts once, publish everywhere from that one place.

Photographs

Around ten, of real work, real premises, real people. From a modern phone, in daylight, is fine.

What works: finished jobs, before and after pairs, the van, the shopfront, you.

What does not: stock photography of a smiling call centre. Everybody recognises it, and it costs you more credibility than an imperfect real photograph ever will.

If you have a Google Business Profile, these are the same photographs that should go on it, which makes the effort count twice.

Domain access

Either the login for the registrar where your domain lives, or a decision to register a new one.

This is the single most common cause of a delayed launch, because the domain was registered in 2016 by a person who no longer works there, using an email address that no longer exists. If that is your situation, start unpicking it now rather than on launch day. See do I need a domain first.

One decision about what happens next

What should a visitor do? Ring you, book a slot, send a message, or fill in a form.

Pick one. A page offering four equally weighted options converts worse than a page offering one obvious one. You can have the others as secondary, but the primary action should be the one you actually want.

For most trades it is a phone call. For most salons it is a booking. For most professional services it is a form or a call. Choose based on how you actually get work, not on what looks modern.

What you do not need

Worth saying, because these hold projects up unnecessarily.

Finished copy for every page. Answer questions and let it be drafted for you. Owners write badly about themselves, not from lack of ability but because it is uncomfortable.

A logo, if you do not have one. A clean wordmark is fine and can be replaced later.

Every page decided. Launch with what you know and add pages once you can see what people ask about, which is the case for starting with one page.

A perfect list of services. It will change. The site should be easy to change, which is a property of how it is built rather than something you must get right up front.