Getting a website built: what you have to supply

In the spring a client sent me his material, and sent it properly: a text document with just over 900 words for the entire website, six embedded images, plus a printed revision proposal carrying more than forty handwritten annotations on the existing site. That is considerably more than most people supply.

And it still was not enough.

I am not writing this as a complaint. The company sent everything it had. It is just that “everything there is” and “everything a website needs” are rarely the same thing, and you only see the gap between them once somebody tries to build a page out of it. So that this does not surface in month three, I now do it on day one.

Measure first, read second

These days I do not read the material first. I measure it. Every image gets its pixel dimensions noted down, every block of text its word count, every person named gets a tick or does not. That takes half an hour and answers the question that would otherwise stay open for two months.

With this client the result looked like this. The largest image supplied was not quite 1300 pixels wide, an exterior shot of the premises. The team photo, six people, came in at under 600 pixels. Three further images sat around 500. A full-width header image on a current screen needs about 2400 pixels. So the team photo had less than a quarter of what was needed.

On top of that it carried the photographer’s watermark. That is not an annoyance, it is useful information: you do not have the original, you have the preview the photographer sent over for selection. The original is in his archive, and it is usually retrievable with a phone call. That question is settled in ten minutes and may save you an entire shoot.

The five things it almost always hangs on

Text. Reckon on 250 to 400 words per subpage, rather more for the home page and the service pages. just over 900 words for a complete company website is usable raw material, but it is not finished content. Completeness matters more than volume: with this client five of six profiles were written, the sixth was missing entirely, while the name and job title were already there. On the finished page that is a hole every visitor sees, and it is always the same person who then has to fill it in a hurry.

Images. Two numbers will do: around 2400 pixels wide for a full-width image, around 1200 for a half-width one. Send the original files, even if they are large. Resizing and preparing them for the web is my job; enlarging them is nobody’s. One individual portrait of each person on the team, not cropped out of the group shot. And more real pictures from inside the business than seems necessary to you. What is everyday to you is the most interesting thing about your company to an outsider. Whether phone photos will do or you need a proper shoot is a question I have worked through here.

Client logos and quotes. Here is a pattern I keep seeing. In the text document there was a note to self: “request the logo from everyone plus a statement for the home page”. Eleven client names appeared in the text. At handover, nothing had been collected. That is not carelessness. A task made up of eleven separate requests, carrying neither a date nor a name, never gets done; it simply migrates from meeting to meeting. If you want that section on your site, give it both today: a person and a date. Eleven emails is twenty minutes of work, and you are entitled to ask your web person for the template.

The legal pages. Imprint, privacy policy, terms and conditions. Settle explicitly, once, who writes what, because this is where both sides quietly assume it is the other one. With me, I write the imprint and the privacy policy and adapt them to the business. You supply the terms and conditions, because those are your trading terms and not mine. In this client’s material the privacy policy was missing altogether, the imprint appeared nowhere, and the terms existed as an unapproved draft. That is entirely normal. It is simply better when one line records who does it by when.

The access. Domain, hosting, mailboxes, Google Business Profile. The question “who owns your domain, and who can move it?” is one remarkably few businesses can answer on the spot. Find that out before switchover day rather than on it. If the answer is “my nephew set that up years ago”, it is not a disaster, but it needs two weeks of lead time instead of two hours.

Only the person setting it sees the contradictions

Going through the material turns up things that nobody inside the company has noticed for years. In this case one person was listed in the heading as a technical specialist while the text underneath said she sat on the board. Two unfinished notes were standing in the middle of the running text, one of them just “image 22”. And the landline number in the contact section was supposed to go, according to one of their own annotations, yet was still sitting in the document.

None of that is a reproach. It is the normal state of a document several people have worked on over years. It is simply the reason I do not just take content over but go through it and ask. Each of those spots needs a decision, and I cannot make it for you.

What happens when something is missing

Nothing dramatic, provided it is agreed beforehand. I put a visible placeholder in the spot so that nothing gets lost, and carry on building. Whatever arrives later goes in later. Missing content does not block the launch, and that is written into my quotes.

One thing really does move, though, and that is the date. The clock only runs with your content. My quotes say “preview within four weeks, from the order and the delivery of the content”, and the second half of that sentence is the important one. A date without material is a wish. What my fixed price includes and what you contribute is set out on the web design page.

The list to work through

Before a project starts, get these eight points onto one sheet:

• Text per page, noting what is still missing and who writes it
• Every person named, with job title and text
• Images as original files, around 2400 pixels wide for the large ones
• Individual portraits of everyone who is going on the site
• The logo as an original file on a clear background, not copied out of a slide deck
• Client logos and quotes, with a person and a date behind them
• Imprint, privacy policy, terms: who writes what by when
• Access to domain, hosting, mail and Google Business Profile

When far less is needed

This programme belongs to a business with several people, reference clients and several services. A sole trader with no team and no client list gets there faster with around 400 words, ten good phone photos and a clear price than with six months of gathering material. Less material does not mean less website in that case. It means going live sooner, with the rest growing in afterwards.