The honest answer to "how long"
A small business website, six to ten pages with a booking link and a contact form, takes two weeks from kick-off to live when the client is ready. It takes four to eight when they are not. The difference is almost never the design or the code. It is copy, photos and decisions.
Here is what actually happens in each of the ten working days, so you can see where your part sits and why it matters.
Before day one: the kick-off call
Forty-five minutes. We confirm who the site is for, what a visitor should do (book, call, enquire), the pages, and the two or three competitor sites you like or hate. We agree the page list and the deadline for your copy and photos. You leave with a short list of what to send and when.
If you already have a site, we crawl it the same day: every URL, every title, every page that ranks. Nothing gets lost in the move.
Week one
Day 1: structure and words. We turn the page list into a sitemap and write the skeleton of each page: headings, sections, where the calls to action sit. If you are writing the copy, this is the outline you fill in. If we are, this is the day we draft the home and services pages from the kick-off notes and the one-conversation method.
Day 2: design direction. One home page design, on a phone and a desktop, using your logo, colours and a couple of real photos or good placeholders. Not three options. One considered direction, with the reasoning, that you react to.
Day 3: your feedback, our revisions. You send comments on the home page. We adjust. This is where "I don't like the blue" and "the phone number should be bigger" get resolved once, before they multiply across ten pages.
Day 4: the build starts. With the direction agreed, we build the real pages: the design system, the header and footer, the home page, in the platform we agreed. Content that has arrived goes in as we go.
Day 5: inner pages. Services, about, contact. The booking link is wired to your booking tool. The contact form is connected and tested, with the email actually arriving in your inbox.
By Friday you can click around a real site at a private address. It has your copy where you have sent it and clear placeholders where you have not.
Week two
Day 6: content deadline. This is the day all copy and photos need to be in. Everything after this assumes the content is final. Late content does not delay the launch by a day; it delays it by however long the gap is, plus a day.
Day 7: search and speed. Titles and descriptions for every page. Structured data for your business type. Image compression. A test on a mid-range phone. The site should load in under two seconds and pass Google's speed thresholds before anyone sees it.
Day 8: review round. You go through every page on your own phone. We ask you to actually fill in the form and click the booking link. Comments go in one list. We fix them the same day.
Day 9: launch prep. Domain and hosting confirmed. Redirects from every old URL loaded and tested. Analytics installed and the enquiry event verified. The launch checklist, twenty-odd items, ticked off.
Day 10: live. Usually a morning. Domain pointed, certificate confirmed, sitemap submitted to Google, every page checked on the live address. Then the recorded walkthrough: a fifteen-minute video of how to edit your own content, sent the same afternoon.
The two things that stretch it
Copy. Writing about your own business is harder than it sounds and it gets pushed to evenings. Sites stall here more than anywhere else. The fix is to decide at kick-off whether you write or we write, and if you write, to use the outline from day one and the day six deadline as real.
Decisions. A partner who has not seen the design until day eight. A logo redesign that starts mid-build. A page list that grows. Each is legitimate and each restarts a piece of the schedule. Get everyone who has a say into the kick-off call.
What we need from you, in one list
- Logo files and brand colours, if you have them.
- Copy, or the decision that we write it.
- Photos, or the decision to use stock for launch.
- Logins for your domain, booking tool and any existing site.
- Feedback within a day of each review point.
With those, two weeks holds. It has held on most of the websites we build, and when it has not, the delay was on the list above.