What to prepare before hiring someone to build your website

After eight years of building websites and running campaigns, I've noticed that when projects go badly, it often comes down to poor preparation.

Six weeks in, someone is still waiting on photos. Nobody can find the domain login. The client has just seen the first draft and said "this isn't what I had in mind," without ever having said what they did have in mind.

It's the part clients are rarely told about before they sign.

The difference between a website finished in seven days and the same website finished in seventy usually comes down to how long it takes to get each answer.

I don't say that to assign blame. Experience tells me that good preparation makes the whole project easier for everyone. When the content, images, access details and key decisions are ready early, I can keep moving without unnecessary stops. When those pieces arrive gradually, even small delays can add up and stretch the timeline much further than expected. A little preparation at the start usually saves a lot of time later.

So the honest requirement is that both sides put time into it. If you're genuinely too busy running the business, which is often the right priority, then authorise someone to own this. A few hours a week, one person who can find files, get approvals and answer questions.

Do you already have a website, or are we starting from nothing?

Two very different jobs both get called "I need a website," and they start in opposite places.

A website that doesn't exist yet. Nothing to analyse, no data, no habits to unlearn. Faster in some ways, because there's no legacy to work around. Slower in others, because every question is open.

A website that exists but isn't bringing anything in. This one deserves a warning. The website may not be the problem.

Before rebuilding anything, it's worth finding out where the loss actually happens. A website converting badly and a website receiving the wrong visitors look identical from the outside. The enquiries don't come either way. But they need completely different fixes.

If someone is vegan and says they're hungry, and the ad they see is for a steakhouse, nothing is wrong with the steakhouse. The wrong person was invited. Rebuilding the restaurant won't help.

That happens constantly with ads. Traffic arrives, bounces, and everyone concludes the website is bad. Sometimes the website is fine and the targeting is sending people who were never going to buy.

So if a website already exists, gather this and hand over the logins before anyone decides to rebuild. Whoever you hire needs to get inside the accounts and look properly, not guess from the outside:

Analytics. Where traffic comes from, which pages people land on, how long they stay
Search Console. What people actually searched to find you
Clarity or similar recordings. Where people stop, hesitate, and leave
Ad accounts. What's been run, what it cost, what came back
Anything already tried, and what happened

Sometimes the honest answer after looking at the data is that the website doesn't need changing at all.

That's why gathering this first is worth an afternoon. The alternative is paying for a new website that doesn't convert either, because the problem was never the website.

Decide what the website is actually for

Whether you're building a new website or fixing one that already exists, one question comes before everything else. What one action matters most?

A phone call. A form. An order. A booking. A quote request. One of them.

This determines the structure, what goes above the fold, how many pages exist, and what gets cut. A website built to generate phone calls looks nothing like a website built to take orders, even when the business is identical.

The wrong answer is "all of them." If everything is equally important, nothing is, and people leave having done none of it.

Write it in one sentence before the project starts. Everything below is easier once that sentence exists.

Domain and hosting

The domain

The domain is the name your website lives at, the thing people type into the address bar. It's also the one thing you can't afford to lose access to, and it's the thing most often registered by someone who no longer answers emails.

If you don't have one yet, don't rush out and buy it. Ask whoever you hire where to register it and what to register. It costs around €10 to €15 a year, the choice of registrar affects how easily it moves later, and the name itself is worth a short conversation before it's locked in for a decade.

If you already have one, find out these three things, if you don't know them already:

Where it's registered. GoDaddy, Namecheap, a local registrar, or a hosting company that bundled it in. Log in and confirm you can actually get there.

Who legally owns it. A domain is registered to a person or a company, and that owner is the only one who can move it, renew it, or point it somewhere else. Paying for it doesn't make you the owner. Very often the domain sits under the name of whoever set it up years ago, an agency, a former employee, a friend who helped out. The business assumes it owns the domain and finds out otherwise at the worst possible moment, usually when that person has stopped replying to emails.

Log in and check whose details are listed as the registrant. If it isn't you or your company, ask for the transfer now, while everyone is still on good terms.

When it expires. Set auto-renew, and put the date in a calendar anyway. An expired domain takes a website offline instantly.

The hosting

If you already have hosting, find the login and check two things.

What you're paying. Plenty of small businesses pay €150–300 a year for shared hosting slower than the free alternatives. If the new website is static, you may not need paid hosting at all. Cloudflare Pages and Netlify both host static websites free, faster, with nothing to maintain.

Whether your email lives there too. This one catches people out. If business email runs through the same account as the website, moving the website can take email down with it. Fixable, but only if it's known in advance.

If you have none of it

Then don't buy anything yet. Whoever builds the website should tell you what it needs and why, and the answer is often cheaper than expected. Buying hosting before the project starts usually means paying for something that gets replaced.

What you should do is decide who owns the accounts. Register them in your name, with your email, and give access, rather than having someone else register them "for now." Ownership set up correctly at the start costs nothing. Untangled later, it costs weeks.

Who writes the copy for your website?

This is where projects stall. The designer waits for text. The client waits for a design to write into. Both wait politely. Six weeks disappear.

Someone else writes it alone. Fast and polished, and it depends entirely on how much they bother to learn first. A writer who studies your competitors, asks proper questions or already knows your industry can produce something better than you would have written yourself. So it's the option with the widest range of outcomes. Done well, it's the best text the website will ever have. Rushed, it addresses a customer who doesn't exist and skips the objection everyone has before buying, and that costs you real enquiries. The risk is that both versions read well, so you can't tell which one you got until the numbers come in months later.

You write it alone. The cheapest option, and plenty of business owners write perfectly well. The problem isn't ability, it's time. Writing a website properly takes days, not an evening, and those are days you're not selling, quoting or running the business. It usually ends up decent rather than as good as it could have been, and the hours came out of something more valuable.

Which is why I think the third option is the best one.

You answer, they shape. This is the one that works. You send rough, unpolished answers about what you sell, who buys it, what they ask before buying, what they worry about, what you'd tell a friend to watch out for. Someone else turns that into pages. You know the business; they know how it reads on a screen.

That set of answers is the single most valuable thing you can prepare, and it's the option I prefer to work with. I send a questionnaire that covers everything I need, you fill it in with rough answers, and from there the research is mine. Competitors, search terms, what people in your market are actually looking for. You spend an afternoon on the part only you can do, and I spend the rest of the week on the part you'd have had to learn.

One more reason to settle this early. The text comes first and the design follows it, not the other way round. A layout built around real sentences fits them.

Design direction

Here's where the most time gets lost, and it's rarely about anything technical.

There are two honest ways to approach the look of the website. Both work. The problem is choosing neither and discovering it at the first draft.

Option one: you have a view

You know what you like. You want to be involved in how it looks.

Then say so, and be specific about it early. Send three or four websites you genuinely like, whether competitors or businesses in other industries, with one sentence each about what you like. Not "this is nice." Something closer to the way the products are shown large with nothing around them, or how little text there is on the first screen.

Say what you don't want too. Dark websites, sliders, stock photos of people in offices, whatever it is. A short list of exclusions saves more time than a long list of inspirations.

State anything that's already fixed, too. Brand colours you can't change, a logo that can't be touched, a product photo the owner insists on. These aren't obstacles, but discovering them after the design is done means redoing it.

Three or four references are useful. Twenty are noise, and they usually contradict each other.

Option two: you don't have a view

Which is a completely legitimate answer. Most business owners aren't designers and don't want to be. The version I hear often is I don't know what it should look like, I just know I want more calls.

Then the brief is the goal, not the aesthetic. Whoever builds it proposes a direction, explains why it's built that way, and you judge it against whether it will get you those calls.

But this only works if you mean it, and here's the tension nobody names at the start.

The trust problem in the middle

If you hand over the direction and then reject the result because it isn't to your taste, you've had the disadvantages of both options. No input at the start, and a redo at the end. That's the most expensive way to run a project, and it's the most common.

So the real question isn't "do I have opinions about design." It's this:

If the person you hired shows you something you personally wouldn't have chosen, but can explain why it will convert better, are you willing to run it?

If yes, give them the direction and let them carry the risk. That's what you're paying for.

If no, and that's a perfectly reasonable answer, it's your business and your name on it, then say so at the start and be involved from the first sketch. Both work. Only the mix of the two doesn't.

Worth being direct about my own position here. I don't think of myself as a designer. I'm a marketer who builds websites. The layout exists to make a specific thing happen, and when I argue for something, it's because I think it'll produce more enquiries, not because I think it looks better.

Brand assets: three situations

You have a brand book

Ideal. Send it even if it's out of date. Logo files, colours, fonts, rules about usage. It removes guessing and keeps the website consistent with everything else you print or post.

You have a logo and not much else

Common, and workable. Send whatever you have and let whoever builds the website tell you if anything is missing. The one thing worth checking yourself is whether the logo exists as a vector file rather than only as an image pulled off the old website, because that difference decides whether the header looks sharp or slightly blurry.

You have nothing

Also fine, but it's a decision rather than something to leave open. Three routes:

Hire a designer for the identity first. Best result, separate cost, adds a few weeks. Sensible if the brand will live outside the website too, on packaging, signage and print.

Have the person building the website handle a light version. Not a full identity, but a wordmark, a colour palette and a type choice, consistent enough to look deliberate. Enough for a website to launch and look professional.

Launch with something plain and revisit later. Clean typography, one colour, no logo beyond your name set well. Less exciting, and it beats waiting six months for an identity while the website sits unbuilt.

What matters is choosing one on purpose. The failure case is assuming a web project quietly includes branding, then finding out at the design stage that it doesn't.

Photos

Design gets the credit and photos do the work. A well-built website with weak photos looks cheap. A simple website with strong photos looks expensive.

Gather:

Product photos, full resolution, plain background where possible. The originals, not screenshots, not images cropped from a supplier's catalogue.

Photos of the work, if it's project-based. Before and after, finished results, the workshop, the process.

Photos of you or the team. For a service business this matters more than expected. A real face on a contact page increases enquiries. It doesn't need a studio, but it needs to be sharp and well lit.

Anything showing scale or context. A room with your furniture in it. A bottle on a table. Someone using the thing.

Avoid stock photography of smiling people at laptops. Everyone recognises it, and it quietly says there was nothing real to show.

Be honest about what you have. If the photos are weak, budgeting a half-day shoot usually beats building a website around images that undercut it. It's a few hundred euros and it affects every page.

Send everything in one folder at original size, not through a chat app, which strips resolution.

Access, in one list

Gather the logins before the project starts, not when they're urgently needed:

Domain registrar
Hosting control panel
Google Analytics and Search Console
Google Business Profile
Ad accounts
Social accounts, if they'll be linked or embedded
Email provider, if separate from hosting

What I usually do is set up one shared folder at the start of the project and put everything in it as we go. Logins, logo files, photos, invoices, anything that turns up later. It saves hunting through old messages during the build, and it keeps working long after the website launches. Three years from now, when you need the hosting login or want to hand the whole thing to someone else, it's all in one place instead of scattered across inboxes and people who no longer work with you.

Who does what, exactly

Most disagreements come from an assumption nobody said out loud.

You provide: the goal, the logins, the logo files, the photos, raw answers about the business, prices, legal details, and approvals. Nobody can do these for you, and each one blocks the project when missing.

Whoever builds the website provides: structure, design, the build, technical SEO, speed, forms, deployment, and telling you plainly when something you've asked for will hurt the result.

Shared, and worth agreeing in advance: the copy. Usually you write rough answers and they shape them. If nobody says it at the start, both sides assume the other is handling it.

Possibly a third person: photography, a full brand identity, or a copywriter if the writing is heavier than a few pages. Separate jobs, separate costs. Anyone offering to build the website, shoot the products and create the brand is usually offering a mediocre version of three things.

Two questions worth asking before signing:

Who owns the files when it's finished? You should. Source files, repository, hosting account, all in your name. If a website can only be updated by the person who built it, you don't own a website. You own a subscription.

What happens after launch? Small fixes for a few weeks are normal. Ongoing changes are a separate arrangement. Agree which is which before there's a disagreement about it.

What you don't need to prepare

To be fair about it, a few things clients worry over that don't matter much.

A sitemap or page structure. That's the job of whoever builds it, based on the goal you set.

Hosting decisions. As above. Don't buy anything yet.

Finished text for every page. Rough answers beat polished paragraphs, because polished paragraphs hurt to cut, and cutting is most of the work.

A logo, if you don't have one. It's a decision to make, not a thing to have ready.

What this actually buys you

A project with all of this ready runs about four to six weeks. The same project with photos "coming soon," copy in progress, and design direction undecided runs three to four months, and the extra time is entirely waiting.

Said plainly, none of this fixes a weak offer. A good website makes a good business easier to find and easier to buy from. It doesn't make people want something they didn't want.

But if the offer is good and people still aren't finding you or buying from you, that part is fixable.

Working on a new website, or fixing one that isn't bringing anything in? Tell me what you sell and what isn't working.