Website planning checklist

Who the site is for, what you want a visitor to do, who owns the content for each page, and any hard constraints on budget or timing. Those four answers let a studio scope accurately. Without them, early conversations produce a quote against assumptions rather than against your business, and the scope changes later.

Fewer than most businesses assume. A clear offer, the proof behind it, who it is for and how to get in touch will outperform twenty thin pages. Page count should follow from what you genuinely have to say, because every additional page needs an owner and ongoing maintenance.

Someone inside your business needs to own it, even where a studio drafts. Nobody else knows the objections your buyers raise or the language they use. Unowned content is the single most common reason a website project stalls halfway or launches thinner than planned.

Before. Information architecture, URL structure and heading hierarchy are decided during planning, and they are expensive to change afterwards. Ongoing ranking work happens after launch, but the structure that ranking depends on is set during the build.

Analytics and conversion tracking, and who holds the domain, hosting and CMS accounts. Neither is exciting, and both are painful to sort out later — the first means you cannot tell whether the new site worked, the second is a genuine commercial risk if the accounts sit with someone else.