What to Get Ready Before Your Web Designer Starts

Five things cover almost every website build: access to your domain and hosting, your logo in its original file format, the words for each page, real photographs, and a clear list of what you sell. Gather those before anyone starts designing and the project runs smoothly. Leave them until you are asked and you will spend the next month being chased.

Most people go into a website project expecting to be asked about colours and layouts. Those conversations happen, but they are rarely what holds things up. What holds things up is a logo nobody can find the original of, or a domain registered years ago by someone who has since left. This is what to have ready, and just as usefully, what you can stop worrying about.

The short checklist

What	Why it matters	Priority
Domain and hosting access	Nothing can go live without it	Essential
Logo in a vector file	Stays sharp at every size	Essential
The words for each page	Pages cannot be designed around content that does not exist	Essential
A list of your services and prices	Decides the structure of the whole site	Essential
Photographs of your work	The single biggest trust signal you have	High
Reviews and testimonials	Independent proof beats any claim you make	High
Brand colours and fonts	Keeps the site consistent with your van, signage and cards	Helpful
Two or three sites you like	Faster than describing a style in words	Helpful

1. Access, not just passwords

This is the one that catches people out most often, and it is worth checking today even if you are months away from starting.

You need to know who controls your domain name and where it is registered. Not the password to your email, the actual registrar account. If a previous designer registered it on your behalf, it may be sitting in their account rather than yours, which is a problem worth solving before it becomes urgent. Nominet, the official registry for .uk domain names, keeps a record of the registrant, and your registrar can confirm who that is.

The same goes for hosting, your Google Business Profile and any analytics account. Being locked out of your own Business Profile is depressingly common and can take weeks to resolve through Google's recovery process, so it is far better discovered early.

Two questions worth reading up on if any of this is unclear: who actually owns my website and the difference between a domain and hosting.

2. Your logo, in the file it was created in

Designers need a vector file: SVG, AI, EPS or a vector PDF. Vectors are drawn with maths rather than pixels, so they stay crisp whether they sit in a footer at 40 pixels wide or across a phone screen at full width.

What does not work is a JPEG pulled off your Facebook page or lifted from a business card. It will be low resolution, it usually has a white box baked in behind it, and it cannot be recoloured for a dark background.

File type	Usable on a website?
SVG, AI, EPS, vector PDF	Yes, the originals, use these
High resolution PNG with transparency	Workable for most uses
JPEG from social media or a business card	No, too small and no transparency
A photograph of your signage or van	No, but useful as a reference for redrawing

If the original files are genuinely lost, which happens often enough that it is worth saying plainly, the logo can be redrawn as a vector. That is chargeable work rather than something absorbed into a build, so it is better to spend ten minutes searching old emails first. Whoever designed it will usually still have it.

3. The words

This is the part people dread, and it is the part that most often stalls a project. It helps enormously to separate two things that get muddled together: writing the content and knowing the content.

You do not have to be a writer. Most designers, myself included, offer copywriting, and a good one will interview you and write from what you say. But nobody can invent what you actually sell, who you sell it to, what you charge, or why someone picked you over the firm down the road. That knowledge only exists in your head, and getting it out is the real task.

The most useful thing you can send is not polished prose. It is honest, rough notes covering:

1. Every service you offer, and any you want to stop offering
2. The areas you cover, named properly, so Truro and Wadebridge appear rather than just "Cornwall"
3. What a typical customer is worried about before they call
4. What you do differently from your competitors, in your own words
5. Any accreditations, insurance or guarantees worth mentioning

Send that in a single document and a designer can build a site around it. Send it as five separate emails over a month and the project restarts five times. One page should do one job, which is a principle I have written about in what makes a great small business website.

4. Photographs

Real photographs of your work, your team and your premises consistently outperform stock images. Visitors can tell the difference instantly, and stock photography of a smiling stranger in a hard hat quietly signals that there was nothing genuine to show.

A modern phone camera is fine for most of this. Shoot in daylight, hold it steady, take more than you think you need, and cover:

• Finished work, ideally with a before shot alongside it
• You and your team, even one decent portrait
• Your van, premises or workshop
• Work in progress, which builds more trust than a polished result on its own

Send originals rather than images that have been through WhatsApp, which compresses them heavily. Your designer will resize and compress properly for the web. It is also worth knowing every image needs a short text description for screen reader users, which is both a courtesy and part of the WCAG accessibility guidelines. Telling your designer what is happening in each photo makes those descriptions accurate.

5. Services, prices and proof

Your service list determines the structure of the entire site, so it is worth settling early. Decide which services get a page of their own and which are a paragraph within a broader one.

On pricing, publishing something is almost always better than publishing nothing. It does not have to be a full price list. A starting price, a typical range, or an example job with a figure attached all help people self-qualify before they call, which means fewer time-wasting enquiries.

Proof matters more than any of your own claims. Gather links to your Google reviews, any written testimonials you have permission to publish, trade body memberships and insurance details. Ours sit on a dedicated reviews page, and you can see how real project photography and results are used together across our recent work.

What you do not need to prepare

Just as useful as the checklist. People routinely delay starting because they think these are their responsibility.

You do not need	Why not
A design or a sketch of the layout	That is the job you are paying for. Examples of sites you like are more useful
A page structure or sitemap	Comes out of your service list during discovery
Hosting bought in advance	Buying the wrong hosting first often costs more to undo
Keyword research	Guessing at search terms without data usually points in the wrong direction
A privacy policy already written	Should be built around what your site actually collects. The ICO sets the UK requirements
Perfect, finished copy	Rough and honest is far more useful than polished and vague

The one rule that saves the most trouble

Appoint one person to give approvals. Not a committee, not "I will check with my business partner and get back to you" three separate times on the same question.

Feedback from several people at once tends to conflict, and resolving it is not design work, it is admin that sits between you and a finished website. Gather opinions by all means, but let one person make the call. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to keep a project moving.

The projects that finish fastest are almost never the ones with the simplest websites. They are the ones where somebody had the authority to say yes.

A sensible order to do it in

1. Today: find out who controls your domain and hosting. This is the one with the longest tail if it goes wrong.
2. This week: track down the original logo files and decide who is approving.
3. Next week: write the rough notes on services, areas and prices.
4. Before the build starts: take the photographs and collect your reviews.

If you have none of this yet, that is normal and not a reason to delay a conversation. A good designer will work through it with you and tell you honestly what is missing. What they cannot do is guess. For how this preparation affects the schedule, see how long it takes to build a website, and if you are still choosing who to work with, what to look for when hiring a web designer covers the vetting side.