What I need from you before I can start

The thing that delays a website is almost never the code. It is waiting for words and pictures.

I can build a site in two to four weeks. The ones that take three months take three months because a page is sitting empty waiting for a paragraph nobody has written, and every week that passes makes it harder to come back to. It is unbilled time for me and a delay for you, and it is the one part of this that is entirely inside your control.

So here is the whole list, up front. Most of it takes an afternoon.

Read the last section first if you are short on time. None of this is a prerequisite. If you send me nothing but your logo and a phone number, I will write and design the lot and show you a draft. This list exists so that the parts you do care about come out sounding like you rather than like me.

Everything else on this page is optional. These five are not, because nothing can go live without them.

1. Your business name, exactly as you want it written. Including whether it is "The Pooch Pit" or "Pooch Pit", and whether there is an LLC or Inc that belongs in the footer.
2. A phone number, an email address, and an address — or a service area, if customers do not come to you.
3. Your hours, including the days you are closed.
4. What you do, in a sentence you would say out loud to somebody at a barbecue. Not marketing language. The sentence you actually use.
5. Who it is for. "Dog owners in Camas" is enough. "Everybody" is not, and it is the most common answer I get.

That is the floor. With those five I can put a real site in front of you.

Photographs are the single biggest difference between a site that looks like a real business and one that looks like a template, and they are usually the highest-return money in a website budget. A good photographer for half a day costs less than most of the systems I sell and does more for your phone ringing.

So that is my first recommendation: hire one. Half a day, your premises, your team, your work. You will use those pictures for years, on the site, on Google, on Instagram, in print.

But plenty of businesses do not have photographs and are not going to pay for them this month, and a site still has to go live. Here is what I do instead, in the order I would try them.

Modern phone cameras are genuinely good enough for a website. What goes wrong is not the camera, it is not knowing what to shoot.

So I will send you a shot list — usually eight to twelve specific pictures, the ones the design actually has holes for. "The front of the shop from across the street, in the morning." "Your hands doing the thing you do." "The waiting area, tidied, lights on, nobody in it." Photograph those over a week when the light is good, send me everything including the ones you think are bad, and I will pick and edit.

A rule that does most of the work: shoot near a window, never with the overhead lights as your only source, and take ten of each. I only need one.

Stock photography is fine when it is honest — a background texture, a landscape, an object. It is obvious and it hurts you when it is pretending to be your business: the stock photo of a smiling team in a bright office reads as fake because it is.

So I use it for atmosphere and never for proof. I will choose and license the images, and I will tell you which ones are stock so you always know which parts of your site are literally true.

This is the one people do not know is available, and it is often the best looking of the three.

A site can be built to carry its weight with type, colour, texture and illustration instead of pictures. Big confident headings, a strong palette, custom icons, an illustrated header, real pricing laid out beautifully. Plenty of the best-looking small business sites on the internet have almost no photography in them at all.

If you have no pictures and do not want any, say so at the start and I will design to that instead of leaving holes to fill later. It is a different design, not a worse one.

What I will not do is put a grey placeholder box on your live site and hope you send something. That is how a site sits half-finished for a year.

Same shape as the photographs: useful if you have them, and there is a plan if you do not.

If you have one: send the original file if you can find it — an .ai, .svg, .eps or .pdf from whoever made it. A logo pulled off your Facebook page is 400 pixels wide and will look soft on a phone screen, which is where most people will see it.

If you cannot find the original: send the best version you have and I will redraw it cleanly. This is routine and usually takes me an hour.

If you do not have one: I will design one. A wordmark — your name, set properly, in a typeface chosen for your business — is included in the build and is honestly the right answer for most local businesses. A full identity with a symbol, variants and a usage guide is a bigger piece of work and I will quote it separately.

If you have them written down: send them however they exist. A menu, a spreadsheet, a photo of the board on the wall, a screenshot of a text message. Anything. Do not retype it for me.

If they are in your head: tell me on the call and I will write them up and send them back for you to correct. Correcting a list is ten minutes. Writing one from nothing is the thing that takes people three weeks.

If you would rather not publish prices at all: that is a legitimate choice, and the site changes shape — enquiry-led rather than price-led. Worth deciding deliberately rather than by default, and I will tell you honestly which one I think suits your business.

Reviews, testimonials, before-and-after pictures, awards, certifications, how long you have been doing it. This is the section that does the actual selling, and it is almost always the emptiest folder.

If you have reviews on Google or Facebook: send me the link, not the text. I will pull the good ones and link back to the source so a stranger can check they are real. An unattributed quote on a website is the weakest form of proof there is.

If you have none yet: that is fixable and it is worth fixing before launch, because it is the highest-return thing you can do for a local business. There is a guide in this library on how to ask for reviews and what Google actually allows.

If you genuinely cannot show work — private clients, confidentiality — we lean on specifics instead: years in business, credentials, the process described precisely, guarantees you are willing to put in writing.

Because people apologise for these constantly.

• You do not need to write the website. I write it. You correct it.
• You do not need a sitemap, a wireframe, or a document about your brand values. If you have one I will read it. Nobody needs to make one.
• You do not need to have decided the colours. I will show you a direction and you react to it. Reacting is much easier than choosing.
• You do not need every page ready before launch. We launch the pages that are ready and add the rest. A live five-page site beats a perfect twelve-page site that is still three weeks away.
• You do not need the accounts set up. Domain, Stripe, email, Google — I will walk you through each one when we get there, and there are step-by-step guides in this library for all of them.

One email, one shared folder, or a link to a Google Drive. Do not compress the photographs, do not resize them, do not crop them — send the biggest version you have and let me handle it.

If it is easier to talk than to type, say so. I will get on a call, ask the questions, take the notes, and write it up myself. Several of the sites I am proudest of started as a forty-minute phone call and a folder of pictures taken on a phone.

I can design all of it. Words, layout, colour, a wordmark, and a site that works without a single photograph if that is where you are. You will never be held up waiting to produce something.

What your input buys is not speed. It is that the result sounds like your business instead of like a good template — your sentence about what you do, your real prices, your actual customers in the pictures. Every piece of that you send makes the site more yours and less mine.

So send what you have, tell me what you do not have, and let me do the rest.