Settle six things before anyone designs a single page. What job the site has to do, who is writing the words, what happens to the old URLs, who owns the domain and hosting, when it goes live, and who is allowed to say yes. Redesigns rarely stall on design. They stall on those six.
The most common version of this is a project that runs three months late because nobody decided who writes the service pages. Design gets done in two weeks, the build gets done, and then the whole thing waits on twelve pages of copy that the owner intended to write in the evenings and never did. We have been on both sides of that and the fix is to decide it at the start, in writing, with a name attached.
Decision one: what is the site actually for?
Pick one job. Book appointments, get quote requests, sell online, or explain something complex well enough that people call already convinced. A site can do more than one, but the primary job decides the home page, and a home page trying to do three things does none.
Write it as a sentence you would defend. "The site exists to get quote requests from homeowners in Monroe and Pike County who already know they need the work." That sentence settles more design arguments than any mood board.
Decision two: who writes the words?
Three honest options. You write it, we interview you and write it, or you hand over what exists and we edit. They cost very different amounts and they take very different lengths of time.
The version that fails is the fourth one, where nobody decides and it is assumed the words will appear. If you are going to write it yourself, block the time in a calendar now, because the site cannot launch without it and the whole schedule hangs off that one thing.
About to start a redesign?
Send us the site you have now. We will tell you which of the six decisions is the one likely to hold your project up, before you commission anything.
Get a free website and marketing auditDecision three: what happens to the old URLs?
If the site has been up for years, some of those pages have links pointing at them and positions in search. Change the addresses without redirecting the old ones and you throw that away on launch day. It is quietly the most expensive mistake in a redesign and the least visible, because the site looks great and the traffic quietly halves.
Make a list of every existing URL before anything is touched. Decide for each one whether it survives, merges into something else, or goes away, and write the redirect. This is dull work and it belongs in the quote as its own line.
Decision four: who owns what?
The domain, the hosting, the analytics and the ad accounts should be in the business's name with the business holding the login. Not the agency's. Not the previous web designer's personal Gmail account, which is where we find them more often than you would think.
Sort this out before the project starts, because sorting it out afterwards involves chasing somebody who no longer wants to hear from you. If a proposal does not mention ownership at all, that is your question for the first meeting.
Decision five: when does it go live?
Pick a date and then work backwards, including the parts that do not depend on us. Content deadlines, photography, review rounds, and the fact that your own busy season is a terrible two weeks to be approving page copy.
In a seasonal market this matters more than usual. A Pocono business that makes its year between Memorial Day and the end of leaf season should be launching in March, not in June. We have had clients insist on a July launch and then have no time to review anything, and the site sat at ninety percent for six weeks in the middle of their best trading period.
Decision six: who signs off?
One person. Two at the very most, and they had better agree with each other.
The projects that go around in circles are the ones where a fourth opinion arrives at the last review round with strong feelings about the color. That is not the fourth person's fault. It is a planning failure, and the fix is to name the decision maker at the start and get everyone else's input in week one instead of week nine.
What we would leave until after launch
Plenty. A blog can start empty and fill up. A booking system can come in phase two. Photography can be improved once the site is live and earning. The instinct to launch everything at once is what turns a six week project into a six month one, and a live site earning something beats a perfect one still in review.
What cannot wait is the redirect list, the content plan and the ownership question. Those three are painful to fix afterwards and cheap to settle now.
If you want the six questions asked properly against your own situation, that is the first conversation we have on any redesign. The build side is on the Growth Engine page, what it costs is on the pricing page, and you can start the conversation on the contact page.