How a website gets built.

Eight stages, six weeks on average, and every stage signed off before the next one starts. Here’s exactly what happens, and the one thing I’ll need from you.

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Questions.

Before we even speak, I’ll send you a questionnaire. After the call I’ll send more, built around your business, until I have everything I need. It’s the least glamorous part of the job, and it’s the part that decides whether the rest of it goes well.

Branding.

Some clients arrive with nothing. Some have a logo. Some have a full brand pack. It doesn’t matter much, because either way I build a style guide first: type, colour, spacing, and the rules everything else follows. Twenty years has taught me that agreeing this before anything gets designed is what keeps a website looking like one thing instead of five.

This runs alongside your content questionnaire, so neither of us is waiting on the other. The site you’re reading right now has a style guide of its own.

Content.

I write it. All of it. Your answers turn into the words on the site, written so the right people actually find you. It arrives as a Google Doc, so changing a line is just a comment, and you have the final say on every sentence.

Most people brace themselves for three months of writing their own copy. You won’t write any of it.

The one thing I do need from you is pictures. I can generate images if we have to, but I’ll always tell you a real photographer is worth the money.

Wireframes.

Boxes before beauty. We agree what goes on each page and in what order, while moving it still costs nothing. It is a great deal cheaper to change your mind here than three weeks later.

Design.

Now it becomes a website. The wireframes and the style guide meet in Figma, page by page. You see every screen before a line of code is written, and nothing gets built until you’re happy with it.

Development.

I build it in WordPress, properly. Not a theme with the colours swapped. It’s the only platform I’ve worked with in twenty years, and I’ve still yet to find something a client needed that it couldn’t do.

Launch.

Nothing goes live until it has been through the same checklist every site of mine goes through. Then it’s live: the second half of the fee is due, and your hosting and care plan start the same day, so it’s looked after from the first hour.

Support.

I record video tutorials for your site specifically, and they sit in your dashboard, so the help is inside the thing you need help with. The care plan takes over from there, and I’m still the person you email.

6 weeks

start to finish, on average

50/50

half up front, half on launch

no limit

on rounds of amendments

An online store, or a booking system, an LMS, anything with bespoke development behind it: allow a couple more weeks. There’s no such thing as an average website, but six weeks is what it usually takes.

If half up front is awkward, I’ll split it into monthly payments, and I won’t charge you extra for that.

On amendments, there’s genuinely no set number. In twenty years nobody has taken advantage, so I’ve never needed a limit. If it ever got silly, I’d say so.

That’s the whole process. Shall we begin?

Tell me what you need and I’ll tell you straight what it takes. No pressure, no jargon, no hard sell.

Let’s chat hello@norwichwebsite.design