Most website projects stall in the same place: not the design, not the code, but waiting for the business to send its opening hours.
This is the list of what anyone building your site will need. Gather it first and a build that would have dragged for a month gets done in a week. None of it is specific to us — hand this to whoever you hire.
The basics, exactly as you want them written
Small things, but they have to be decided, and they appear in a dozen places each.
- Your business name, spelled and punctuated the way you want it everywhere.
- Your legal name, if it differs — this goes in the footer and the terms.
- Phone number, and whether you want texts going to it.
- Email address you actually check.
- Address, and whether it should be public. Plenty of trades work from home and would rather not publish it; that is a normal choice, not a problem.
- Opening hours, including the awkward ones. “Closed Sunday” is information. A blank is a visitor wondering.
- Service area — the towns you cover.
Decide the address question early. It affects the map, the footer and your Google listing.
Your services, in your own words
The single most useful thing you can write is a short list of what you do, with a plain sentence under each. Not marketing language. The way you would say it to someone at the counter.
For each service, if you can: roughly what it costs or starts at, roughly how long it takes, and anything people always get wrong about it. That last one is the most valuable sentence on the page and nobody ever volunteers it.
If you offer twenty things, pick the six you actually want more of. A site that lists everything equally tells a visitor nothing about what you are good at.
Photos
The thing most likely to hold up your build.
What helps: your premises inside and out, your team, work you have done, equipment. Daylight. Taken on a phone is fine — genuinely fine, and better than stock.
What to avoid sending: anything with another business’s branding in shot, anything with a customer’s face unless they have agreed, and anything so dark it needs rescuing.
If you have none, say so early. A decent builder has a plan for that, and it is better discussed at the start than discovered in week two. On our builds we use licensed stock where there is no photo, and we will tell you exactly where.
A photo of you is worth more than you think, especially if customers deal with you directly.
Reviews, and access to them
If you have Google reviews, the site should show them. Have your Google Business Profile login findable, or know who in the business has it.
This matters beyond the reviews themselves: the listing carries your hours, your categories and the link to your site, and it is usually the first thing a customer sees. If you have lost access, start the recovery before the build — it can take days.
If you have no reviews yet, that is fine and the site can be built to fill in later. Say so up front so it is planned for rather than patched in.
The decisions only you can make
These hold up more builds than any missing file.
- What do you want someone to do when they land on the site? Call, text, book, walk in. Pick one.
- Who do you want more of? The jobs you want more of should be the loudest thing on the page.
- Do you have a logo, and do you have it as an actual file rather than a photo of a sign?
- Colours, if you have them — from your van, your signage, your existing printed material.
- One sentence on what makes you different. Hardest question on the list. Worth sitting with.
Who is the one person signing things off
Website projects slow down most when three people have opinions and nobody has the final word. Decide who that is before you start, even if it is obviously you.
Domain and hosting
If you already have a domain: find the login. Not the person who set it up — the actual login. This is the single most common delay in the whole process, and the answer is often “a nephew, in about 2019”.
If you do not have one yet, you only need to decide the name. Whoever builds your site can register it, and it should be registered in your business’s name.
The short list
If you do only five things before your first conversation:
- Write your hours down.
- Take twenty photos on your phone, in daylight.
- Find your Google Business Profile login.
- Find your domain login, if you have a domain.
- Decide the one thing you want visitors to do.
That is most of the delay in most website projects, sorted in an afternoon.
If you want to see how the rest of it goes from there — what happens at each stage and how long each part takes — that is on the how it works page.
