A website project stalls in the gaps, not in the work. The build is a handful of days. The waiting is everything else: the logo nobody can find, the domain login that belonged to a former employee, the photographs that were always going to be taken next week.

Gather this lot before anybody starts and a five page site is a few weeks. Leave it to be chased and the same project runs to three months, most of it silence.

The essentials

01 Domain access

Not the website. The domain, which is a separate thing and the one that causes real trouble.

Find out who registered it, which company it is registered with, and whether you can log in. If it was set up by a designer you no longer work with, sort that out now: it is the single hardest thing to unpick later and it is not a five minute job when the person has stopped replying to emails.

It should be registered in your name or your company's, never your designer's.

02 Hosting access

Where the current site lives, if there is one, and the login. Also whether anything else is attached to it that would break if the site moved: email in particular. Business email running through the same provider as the website is common and it is the thing that gets forgotten on a migration.

03 Your logo, in the original format

Not a JPEG pulled off the old site. The vector file: .ai, .eps or .svg. Whoever designed it will have one.

If it genuinely does not exist, say so early. Redrawing a logo so it holds up from a browser tab to a van is real work and it should be priced in at the start rather than discovered in week three. I have had to do exactly that on a construction rebuild where the only surviving file was a low resolution PNG.

04 Photographs

Your own, wherever possible. Your premises, your team, your work, your kit.

Phone photographs of the real thing beat stock library images every time, and in trades they beat them by a distance, because anyone in the industry can tell. Book half a day for this before the build starts rather than after: it is the most common reason a finished site sits waiting to launch.

05 The content

What each page says. There is a whole guide on writing it yourself, including the order to write it in and what to do when you cannot face it.

The short version: content is what delays projects, and it delays them more than everything else on this list combined.

06 Anything the site has to connect to

A booking system, a CRM, an accounting tool, a stock feed, a payment provider, a mailing list. Name them up front with the account access.

Each one is a thing that can break later, so each one gets priced properly, and finding out about a booking integration halfway through is how a fixed price stops being fixed.

07 Your accreditations and memberships

Logos, membership numbers, expiry dates. In construction and trades these do real work on the page, and the current versions matter because an expired badge is worse than no badge.

08 Analytics, if it exists

Google Analytics and Search Console access for the current site. Not essential, genuinely useful: it shows which existing pages get traffic, which is how you decide what must keep its URL when the new site goes live.

The two that get forgotten

Every URL that must keep working. If the current site ranks for anything, or has links pointing at it, those addresses need to survive the rebuild or redirect somewhere sensible. A rebuild that quietly drops them loses the traffic they were earning, and nobody notices for a month.

Who signs it off. One person. Named. A project with three approvers and no decision-maker costs more and takes longer than the same project with one, and the cost is entirely in rounds of changes that cancel each other out.

What to do about the gaps

Some of this will not exist. That is normal and it is fine, as long as it is known at the start.

Send what you have with a note about what is missing. A designer worth hiring will tell you which gaps matter, which can be filled during the build, and which change the price. What nobody can do is plan around a gap they do not know about.

A copy-and-send version

Domain:        registrar, login, registered to whom
Hosting:       provider, login, does email run through it
Logo:          original vector file, or say if there isn't one
Photos:        what exists, what needs taking
Content:       drafted, partly drafted, or need help
Integrations:  booking, CRM, payments, mailing list
Accreditations: logos and current membership numbers
Analytics:     GA and Search Console access
URLs:          anything that must keep working
Sign-off:      who has the final say

If you are about to start a project with me, that is the email. Send it to the enquiry form or reply to whatever thread we already have.

Questions people ask

What if I do not have any of this?

Then say so and it gets built into the project. Missing assets are a pricing question, not a problem. Missing assets that surface in week three are a problem, because by then the plan assumed they existed.

Do I need professional photography?

For most small businesses, no, though it is usually the highest return line in the budget for trades. Your own phone photographs of real work beat stock. What does not work is a site with no imagery of your own at all.

Who should own the domain?

You. Registered in your name or your company's, on an account you can log into. This holds whoever builds the site, and it is the one thing on this list that is genuinely painful to fix afterwards.

How far ahead should I gather this?

Before the project is quoted, ideally. It makes the quote accurate, because a fixed price is only fixed if the person quoting knows what exists.