# What to have ready before commissioning your website

Website projects rarely stall for technical reasons. What usually happens is
that everything sits still for a fortnight waiting on a service description or a
decent photo of the premises.

Go through this list before asking for quotes. Whatever is missing on day one is
what will hold the project up.

## Copy

It does not need to be polished or well written. It needs to exist as raw
material.

- [ ] One sentence explaining what the business does, with no jargon and no
      adjectives. If a neighbour would not understand it, it is not ready.
- [ ] A paragraph per service: what it is, who it is for, what it includes and
      what it does not.
- [ ] Real details for the about page: how long you have been working, where,
      with what kind of client, what qualification or licence sits behind it.
- [ ] Two or three client testimonials with a full name, if you have them.

**If it is missing:** the site gets filled with generic lines that distinguish
the business from nobody and rank for nothing.

## Photos

- [ ] Your own photos of the premises, the team, the product or finished work
- [ ] Landscape, in natural light
- [ ] At least 2,000 pixels wide
- [ ] None taken from an image search

Ten good ones beat a hundred mediocre ones. WhatsApp screenshots and images with
a supplier's watermark do not work.

**If it is missing:** stock imagery takes over. It looks fine, but exactly what
made the site credible is gone.

## Logo and colours

- [ ] The logo in vector format: SVG, AI or EPS
- [ ] If only PNG exists, transparent background and around 1,000 pixels wide
- [ ] Brand colour codes written down, if they exist

**If it is missing:** the logo ends up cropped out of a shopfront photo, and it
shows. Having no logo blocks nothing; a bad logo at large size does hurt.

## Domain and email

- [ ] You know **whose name is on the domain registration** (ask to see the
      registered record, not a verbal confirmation)
- [ ] You know who has access to the panel where it is managed
- [ ] Auto-renewal is on, with a valid payment method
- [ ] You have decided whether email moves to your own domain

**If it is missing:** the site is finished and cannot be published. It is the
most frustrating delay of all, because by then it depends on nobody working on
the project.

## Decisions made

- [ ] Are prices published?
- [ ] Do you need appointment booking, or just a contact form?
- [ ] Is there a blog?
- [ ] Who decides? One person, not three who have not agreed with each other.

**If it is missing:** work stops at that point. Not for lack of hands, but
because whichever path is taken will have to be undone afterwards.

## Legal

- [ ] Name or company name, tax number and address for the legal notice
- [ ] If personal data is processed, who is responsible for it
- [ ] If you sell to consumers, terms of sale and withdrawal information

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## How to genuinely shorten the calendar

1. **Prepare the content before commissioning, not after.** This shortens things
   more than anything else, by some distance.
2. **Name one person who decides.**
3. **Gather your changes and send them in one go.** A list of twenty points is
   applied in one pass; twenty emails take twenty.
4. **Sort the domain on day one.** Ten minutes at the start can save three weeks
   at the end.

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*Díaz Oliva · diazoliva.com*