What to have ready before a website build starts

Access and ownership

This is the section that causes the most delay and gets the least thought. Work through it early, because some of it takes days to recover.

• Your domain registrar login. The account where the domain name itself is registered. This is separate from your hosting and separate from your email, though people often assume all three live in one place.
• Confirmation that the domain is in your name. If a previous designer registered it for you, it may be in theirs. This is worth checking today rather than at launch, because moving a domain between owners takes time and cooperation.
• Access to your current hosting, if a site already exists.
• Whoever controls your DNS. Going live means changing DNS records, and doing that without breaking your email requires knowing what is already there.
• Your Google Business Profile login. Claimed by someone else years ago is a common situation and a recoverable one.
• Your social accounts, if they will be linked or updated.

The facts about the business

These need to be identical everywhere they appear — on the site, on Google, in directories. Search engines treat inconsistency as uncertainty about whether you are one business or several.

• The exact business name, punctuation and all, matching how it appears on Google.
• The address you want published, or the area you serve if you work from home and would rather not publish an address.
• One phone number that will be answered.
• One email address for inquiries, and confirmation of where those messages should land.
• Hours, if that matters to your customers.
• Your registered legal entity name for the legal pages, which is often different from your trading name.
• License, registration, or insurance numbers if your trade requires them displayed.

Words

The most common reason a nearly-finished site sits unpublished for two months. You do not need polished copy, and you do need the raw material.

• What you do, described the way you would say it out loud to someone at a counter.
• Who your customers are, and which of them you most want more of.
• Your services, listed, with a sentence each on what is involved.
• What makes someone choose you over the other three businesses they are looking at.
• The questions you answer on the phone every week. These make the best pages on any small business site, because they are the things people are genuinely searching for.
• Anything you must say for legal or professional reasons.

Images

• Your logo as a vector file — .ai, .eps, or .svg. A logo pulled off your old website is usually too small to use and impossible to enlarge cleanly. If the original is genuinely lost, that is worth knowing at the start.
• Photographs of the actual business. Your premises, your work, your team. These beat stock photography by a wide margin, and visitors can tell the difference immediately.
• A headshot, if the business is built around you personally.
• Confirmation you have the right to use them. Images from a Google search are not yours to publish, and the invoices that follow are real.

Proof

A visitor deciding whether to trust you looks for evidence that other people already have.

• Reviews you can point to, ideally on Google.
• Testimonials, with permission to use the person's name.
• Certifications, memberships, or trade associations.
• Examples of past work, with permission where a client is identifiable.

Decisions

• Who signs off. One person. A project with three approvers takes three times as long and lands somewhere nobody chose.
• What the site is for. Phone calls, form inquiries, bookings, online sales, or simply looking credible when someone checks you out after a referral. These lead to different sites.
• Your real deadline, and what is driving it — a season, an event, a lease, a campaign.
• Who maintains it afterwards, and how comfortable that person is editing a website. This is the question that should decide what the site is built on.

If you are missing several of these

Most businesses are, at the start. The list exists to make the gaps visible early, while they are cheap to close, rather than three weeks in when everything else is finished and waiting.

The two worth chasing first are the domain registrar login and the vector logo. Both can take real time to recover, and both are needed at the end of a project rather than the beginning — which is exactly how a launch date slips.