The website project checklist no one gives you
The most expensive part of a website project is rarely the design. It's the revision rounds that happen when the thinking wasn't done upfront. The copy that gets rewritten three times because no one agreed on what the business was saying. The structure that gets rearranged because the hierarchy wasn't mapped before anyone touched the layout. The brand that turns out not to be ready for a website after all.
None of this is unusual. It happens on projects where everyone involved is perfectly capable – it just happens when the preparation stops at ‘we need a website’ rather than continuing into the harder questions underneath.
This checklist exists to help you do that thinking before a project begins. Not as a test to pass, and not as a list of things you have to have resolved before you're allowed to reach out to a designer. Some of these questions have clear answers; others are the kind of thing a good design process helps you work through. Knowing which is which before you start is itself useful.
1. Clarity on the business – who it's for and what it does
The question: If someone spent two minutes on your website, what would you want them to understand – and what would you want them to do next?
This sounds straightforward. It rarely is. Most founders have a clear sense of what they do, but a less clear sense of how to communicate it to someone who doesn't already know them. A website has to do that work for a stranger – someone who arrived with a question and needs an answer quickly.
The preparation here isn't about writing the copy yet. It's about reaching agreement, with yourself, on a few things: who the site is actually for (not everyone, but the person it's most for), what problem it solves for that person, and what a successful visit looks like. Someone who reads and leaves. Someone who books a call. Someone who downloads something and enters your world. The answer shapes every structural decision that follows.
One question worth writing down before anything else: what must this site never be mistaken for? Knowing what you're not is often clearer than knowing what you are – and it's one of the most useful constraints you can give a designer.
2. Brand foundations – whether your visual identity is ready
The question: Is your brand in a place that feels ready to build from – or is that something to work through first?
A website built on an unresolved brand is a website that often needs rebuilding. Not because the design was wrong, but because the brief was incomplete. The typography, colour, and visual language of a site aren't decorative decisions – they're expressions of what the brand is. If the brand isn't settled, those decisions get made by default rather than by design.
This doesn't mean your brand needs to be perfect before a project begins. It means being honest about where it is. A brand that exists but feels dated is a different starting point from a brand that doesn't exist yet. Both are workable – they just need to be named clearly.
At Mar Mar Co., working on brand and website together is something we do often. Each decision informs the other, and nothing gets lost in translation between the two. If your brand is at an early stage, that's worth saying at the start of a project rather than discovering halfway through.
A few things worth checking: Do you have a logo, and does it still feel right? Do you have a colour palette and type system, or just a rough sense of what you like? Is there a visual language that's consistently applied, or does it vary across different touchpoints? The answers tell you whether you're starting from a foundation or building one.
3. Content – what you actually need, and what state it's in
The question: What copy and visual content do you have, and what still needs to be created?
Content is where most website projects slow down – and where the most avoidable delays live. Design can move quickly. Content almost never does. Copy takes longer to write than anyone expects, photography takes time to commission, and both need to exist before a site can be finished, tested, and handed over.
The preparation here has two parts.
The first is inventory: what do you actually have? Existing copy that can be adapted, photography that's good enough to use, a brand voice that's been articulated somewhere. Don't assume what you have is insufficient – a lot of it may be usable with editing rather than replacement.
The second is honesty about gaps. A few things worth thinking through: How many pages does the site need, and do you have copy for each? Is the copy long enough – not just for your audience, but for search? Short pages with thin content rarely perform well in search results, and the minimum is usually longer than founders expect. Do you have photography that reflects the current state of the business, or is it outdated?
Not every project has the budget for a full photography commission – and it doesn't always need one. Team or founder portraits are worth investing in, but the approach to everything else depends on the brand. Well-chosen stock photography can work beautifully when selected with the brand in mind rather than picked at random – we source from paid libraries as well as free resources like Unsplash and Pexels. Illustration is another option worth considering: outline drawing in particular can work well in a digital context and may already be part of your visual identity. And existing photography may be more usable than you think – sometimes editing and curation is all it takes.
One practical note: images and copy don't need to be finished before a project begins, but they need to be close. A designer working with placeholder content throughout produces a site that has to be significantly adjusted at the end – which costs time and sometimes money.
4. Structure – what pages you need and what each one has to do
The question: What pages does the site need, and what is each one trying to achieve?
Page structure is one of the decisions that's easiest to change at the start of a project and hardest to change once the build is underway. Getting it right requires thinking about the site from the visitor's perspective, not the founder's.
A homepage is not a brochure. It's the first answer to the question a visitor arrived with – and it needs to orient them quickly, establish trust, and give them somewhere to go. Every other page needs a similar clarity of purpose. A services page that lists everything you do isn't the same as a services page designed to move someone from interest to enquiry.
Some questions worth mapping before a project begins: What are the core pages the site needs – home, about, services, contact, and what else? Is there a logical journey from arrival to action, and does the structure support it? Are there pages that could be combined without losing anything important? Are there things you want to add later – a blog, a resource section, additional service pages – and does the structure leave room for them?
That last question connects directly to the next section. A site built for where you are now, without considering where you're going, can create structural problems that are expensive to fix later.
5. Longevity – building for where you're going, not just where you are
The question: What does this business look like in two years, and does the site you're building leave room for that?
The decisions made at the start of a website project determine how much freedom you'll have later. A typography system chosen without considering future extensions. A structure that works for three services but can't accommodate a fourth. A brand that's been built for one offering and can't stretch to a second.
None of this requires knowing exactly what the future looks like. It requires being honest about the questions that are still open. Are there other products, services, or projects you might want to bring under this brand? Is there a possibility of extending the visual identity – a wordmark, a sub-brand, a second site? Do you want to add a blog, a newsletter, or a resource section as the business grows?
At Mar Mar Co., we ask these questions early – not to design the future, but to make sure the present doesn't close it off. A brand and website built with some awareness of what might come next is significantly easier to extend than one that was built purely for the moment.
The goal isn't a site that does everything. It's a site that does what it needs to do now, and can grow without being rebuilt.
How to use this
Work through the five areas before you reach out to a designer – not to have all the answers, but to know which questions are settled and which need work. The clearer you are at the start, the more the design process can focus on the decisions that matter rather than uncovering the ones that should have been made earlier.
If you're not sure where you stand on any of these, that's a useful thing to know too. A good design process is partly a preparation process – and the questions above are ones we work through with every founder we build with.
