The projects that run late are waiting on you, not us

The most common reason a website takes three weeks instead of ten days is a folder of photos that never arrived.

Not a bug. Not a design dispute. A folder of photos. Or copy that's still being written. Or a login nobody can find. Technical problems are real, but they're rare compared to the gaps that open up when a project is waiting on the client — and the client doesn't know it yet.

This isn't a complaint. It happens on almost every project, including ones where the client is organised and well-prepared. The gap usually comes from not knowing what's needed before it's needed. So here's the list, plainly, before we start.

One sentence about what the business actually does

Not the tagline. Not the formal description from the Companies Register. One sentence a stranger would understand: what you sell, who you sell it to, where.

This sounds easy and often isn't. The clearer you are about it before we talk, the faster the design period goes — because every decision about layout, language and hierarchy flows from that sentence. If you're not sure how to phrase it, write three versions and send all three.

The pages you care about most

Tell us the three pages where the most important thing needs to happen. For a restaurant, that might be the menu, the booking page and the homepage. For a clinic, it might be the services page, the team page and the appointment form.

We'll figure out what else is needed during the design period. But knowing which pages you're judging the build on tells us where to spend the thinking time — and where a rough version is fine.

Real photos

This is the single most common delay, and the one with the longest lead time. Stock photography is available but it's not a substitute for photos of your actual space, your actual team, your actual product. Visitors know the difference in about two seconds.

You don't need a professional shoot, though it helps. A phone camera in good light produces photos that work. What you need is the photos before the build starts — not during it, and not after launch when you decide the site looks generic.

If you don't have photos yet, tell us that now. We can work around it, but we need to know.

The text for each page

The design can go ahead without final copy. The build cannot, and neither can the launch.

You know your business better than we do. We can structure, edit and sharpen what you give us. What we can't do is invent the details — your opening hours, your service descriptions, your pricing if you publish it, the specific things that make your business worth choosing. That knowledge lives with you.

Send it rough. A notes document, a voice memo transcribed, bullet points — any of these work. The form doesn't matter. Having it early matters a lot.

Logins for anything we're connecting to

If the site needs to talk to an existing system — a booking platform, a delivery service, an email list, a payment processor — we'll need credentials or API access before that part of the build starts. Finding out that a login is with a former employee, or that an account needs to be verified by phone, or that a platform requires a 48-hour approval process: all of these add days.

Make a list of every external service the site will touch. Find the login. Check that it works. Do this before the project starts, not when we ask for it.

One person who can say yes

This matters more than any of the above. Every project needs one person on the client side who can look at a design, read a page of copy, and say: approved. Not five people who each have notes, not a committee that meets on Thursdays. One person.

Two revision rounds are included in every project. Both of them work better when the feedback comes from one place. When it comes from several, rounds multiply, timelines extend and nobody is happy with the result.

Decide who that person is before we send anything for review.

What you get when this is sorted

A Starter site with everything above in place can be live in ten days. That's build time after the two-day design period, during which we pin down the direction, agree the scope and fix the price in writing. The ten days assumes content arrives when we need it and approvals come back within a working day.

That's not a stretch target. It's what the timeline looks like when both sides are prepared.

If you want to know what falls inside a project and what sits outside it, the pricing page has the breakdown by tier. Or if you'd rather talk it through first, the intro call is 30 minutes and free — book at primevibers.com/intro and we'll tell you exactly what we'll need from you before anything starts.