What To Have Ready Before You Hire Anyone To Build Your Website

Most website projects don't run long because the building took longer than expected. They run long because everything stops while somebody waits on a photo, a login, or a decision about what the business actually does.

I'd rather that didn't happen to you, with me or with anyone else. So here is the list of what to have sitting in one folder before you hire anybody. None of it is technical. All of it is stuff only you can produce, which is exactly why it becomes the bottleneck.

1. A sentence saying what you do and who for

Not a mission statement. One plain sentence a stranger would understand: "I do residential plumbing in Osceola County, mostly emergency callouts and repipes."

This sounds trivial and it is the single most common thing that isn't ready. People know what they do so thoroughly that they've never had to say it, and when asked they either give you a list of thirty services or a paragraph about passion for quality. Neither one tells me what should be at the top of the page.

If you're stuck, try this instead: what do you want more of, and what do you want less of? A business that wants more repipes and fewer three-hundred-dollar callouts needs a very different homepage from one that wants the opposite.

2. Photographs of your own work

Twenty is plenty. Fifteen is fine. Phone photos are fine — genuinely fine, not fine-as-a-compromise. What matters is that they're yours.

A stock photograph of a smiling person in a hard hat actively costs you the job, because everyone has seen it and everyone knows what it means. A slightly crooked photo of a finished bathroom you actually did is worth ten of them.

If you have none, start taking them this week, before you even decide who to hire. Finished jobs, the van, the crew, the workshop. Ten minutes a week for a month and you'll never be short again. This is also exactly what your Google listing needs, so the same folder does two jobs.

3. Your logo, in the biggest version you have

Whatever you've got. The original file if somebody made it for you, otherwise the largest image you can find — off the van, off a shirt, off the sign.

If it only exists as a small blurry image pulled off Facebook, say so early. That's a solvable problem and a cheap one, but it's worse to discover it the day before launch.

If you don't have a logo at all, that's fine too. Plenty of businesses do well without one. Just know it now rather than in week two.

4. The name on the phone, and the phone that gets answered

Decide which number goes on the site, and make sure it's a phone somebody carries. Then decide what happens when it rings and you can't pick up, because for most local businesses that's where the money leaks.

Same for email. If your business email is currently a Gmail address with a number in it, that gets fixed as part of the build — but you'll need to decide what the new address should be, and who else needs one.

5. Your hours, honestly

Including the ones you don't love. If you don't work Sundays, the site should say you don't work Sundays. Every business that fudges this ends up fielding calls it can't service, which is worse than not getting the call.

If you do emergency work outside normal hours at a different rate, write that down too. It's a real differentiator and it usually doesn't make it onto the site.

6. Whatever you already own, and the logins to it

Domain, hosting, an old website, the Google listing, social accounts, a booking platform you pay for monthly. Write down what exists, who it's registered to, and whether you can actually log in.

If some of those answers are "I don't know" or "the guy who set it up," that's worth sorting before you start, not after. It's the single most common way a two-week project becomes a six-week one — not because the work is hard, but because recovering a domain from a registrar takes as long as it takes.

7. One person who decides

The most expensive thing on this list, and the one nobody writes down.

If the site has to be approved by you, your business partner and your spouse, and all three look at it at different times and send notes separately, the project doesn't take longer because of the notes. It takes longer because the notes contradict each other and somebody has to resolve that, and that somebody is usually me, guessing.

Pick one person who has the final word. Everyone else can have opinions; one person decides what happens with them. This is worth more to your timeline than any other item here.

8. A rough idea of what winning looks like

Not a traffic number — you don't have one and neither do I. Something more like: "I want to stop losing the people who call at seven in the evening," or "I want the tryout signups to stop living in a spreadsheet," or "I want to look like a real company when somebody looks me up after a referral."

Say it in those terms and the whole project gets easier to steer, because every decision after that has something to be measured against. A site built to "look professional" can't be judged. A site built to catch the seven-o'clock caller can.

What you don't need

A few things people think they need and don't.

You don't need to know what pages you want. That's my job. Tell me what the business does and who you're trying to reach and I'll tell you what pages it needs — usually fewer than you'd expect.

You don't need written copy. Don't spend a weekend writing page text. You'll hate it and I'll rewrite it. Talk to me instead and I'll write it from that. What you know is worth more than what you can write down at eleven at night.

You don't need to have picked a design. Sending fifteen sites you like is genuinely useful. Sending a design you want copied is less useful, because it was built for somebody else's business.

You don't need to understand any of the technology. Domains, hosting, DNS — none of that should be your problem, and if someone makes it your problem, that's a choice they made.

The honest reason I'm telling you this

Partly it's self-interest: a project where all eight of these are ready is a project I can finish quickly, and no website I build takes longer than 30 days anyway. The clock pauses while I'm waiting on you, and I'd rather it never had to.

But mostly it's that this list is useful whoever you hire. If you gather it and then decide to use a website builder yourself, you'll have a better time doing that too, because the hard part of a website was never the building.

If you've got most of it together, tell me about the business and you'll have a written scope with a price and a date on it before you pay anything.