What to Prepare Before You Start a Website Project

Ask any web designer what stalls a project and you'll hear some version of the same story: the design was ready weeks ago, and everyone's still waiting on the client to send over their copy, or their photos, or a decision about who owns the domain. There's no rigorous industry-wide statistic on how often this happens, and I'm not going to pretend there is. But the pattern itself, content and access holding up an otherwise-finished project, is something web professionals run into constantly, and it's almost entirely avoidable.

None of what follows requires hiring anyone first. It's what to sort out on your own side before you request a single quote, so the weeks after you say yes are spent building instead of waiting.

Start your content before you start looking for a designer

Nielsen Norman Group's guidance on content strategy makes a point that runs against how most people plan a website: content shouldn't arrive after the design is finished, or even partway through. It needs to shape the design from the beginning, because a layout built for placeholder text has to change once real content lands, sometimes substantially. Waiting to write your copy until "the design is ready to fill in" usually means paying for that layout twice.

You don't need finished, polished copy before you talk to anyone. You need a rough draft of the essentials: what you do, who it's for, and what you want a visitor to do once they land on the page. A messy paragraph per section beats a blank page, and it gives a designer something real to build around instead of guessing.

• Real photos, even rough ones
• A rough draft of your copy
• Your logo and any brand colors
• Real testimonials, if you have any

You don't need all four before your first conversation with a designer. But knowing which ones you already have, and which ones you'll need help with, changes what a fair quote even looks like.

Know what a designer will actually ask you

Squarespace's own guidance for the designers it certifies lays out a standard onboarding conversation, and it's a useful preview of what any competent freelancer or studio will ask you, regardless of platform: what your business actually offers, who it's for, what you want the site to accomplish, a couple of sites you like the look of, and, critically, who's responsible for supplying the copy, photos, and brand assets, you or them.

That last one matters more than it sounds. "The designer will handle everything" and "I'll provide my own content" are two completely different projects with two completely different price tags, and a lot of friction later comes from that never being made explicit at the start.

Know who actually owns your domain

This is the one people are most likely to skip, and it can cause real damage later. ICANN, the organization that oversees how domain names work globally, maintains an entire official process for recovering a lost or inaccessible domain name, precisely because this happens often enough to need one. A common way it happens: a developer registers the domain on the client's behalf, under the developer's own account, and years later the business can't get into its own domain when it wants to switch providers or update its site.

Before you start a project, find your domain registrar login yourself, or confirm you have access to whoever holds it. If you don't know, a WHOIS lookup for your domain will show you who's listed as the registrant, which is the fastest way to find out where you actually stand. Whatever you do next, make sure the account is registered in your business's name, not a contractor's.

Decide how feedback and revisions will work, before you need to

AIGA, the design industry's professional association, publishes standard guidance for freelance and studio engagements that treats this as a contract issue, not an afterthought: a defined number of revision rounds, and a written process for anything added after the project's scope was agreed. Whether or not you formalize it with a contract, the underlying habit is worth adopting yourself: batch your feedback into one clear round instead of a stream of one-off messages, and get explicit agreement on what happens if you want changes beyond what was originally scoped.

Open-ended feedback ("just keep sending me thoughts as they come to you") feels informal and easy, but it's one of the more common ways a project quietly drifts past its timeline, because nobody defined what "done" looks like. This is exactly the kind of thing worth asking about upfront when you're comparing quotes, alongside the other questions covered in the cost breakdown.

It's fine to use AI for a first draft

This is genuinely new advice compared to a few years ago: using a general-purpose AI tool to draft a rough first pass at your homepage copy, your about page, or your service descriptions is now a normal, sensible starting point, not a shortcut to be embarrassed about. It won't sound like you yet, and it may get details wrong, but a rough AI draft you edit into your own voice gets you to "something real to work from" much faster than a blank page does. Treat it exactly like the messy first-draft copy described above: a starting point for the person building your site, not a finished product.

The checklist, before you contact anyone

None of these need to be perfect or finished. They need to exist enough that a designer isn't starting from nothing:

1. A rough draft of your content
2. Clarity on your offer, audience, and goal
3. Confirmed access to your domain
4. An agreed feedback and revision process
5. A few reference sites you like
6. Logo and brand assets, if they exist

Showing up with these doesn't just make the project faster. It changes the quality of the quote you get, since what a website costs is driven largely by how much of this work a designer has to do for you versus how much you bring to the table. And once the site is live, the same groundwork, clear content and a defined goal, is what makes it easy to keep building trust with visitors and getting found in search, instead of scrambling to write that copy after launch too.

Frequently asked questions

What's the single most important thing to prepare before starting a website project?
Your content. Nielsen Norman Group's research on content strategy is explicit that content decisions need to happen at the very start of a project, not once design is already underway, because design choices depend on what the content actually is.

What does a web designer need from a client before starting?
Per standard onboarding guidance from platforms like Squarespace, the essentials are: what the business offers, who it serves, the goal of the site, a few reference sites for inspiration, and clarity on who's providing the written copy, photos, and brand assets.

Who should own the domain name for a business website?
The business itself, registered under its own account with its own login. ICANN's own guidance on lost domain names exists precisely because this goes wrong often enough to need an official recovery process, frequently after a developer registered the domain under their own account instead.