The standard version of this article is a twenty-item checklist that makes starting feel like homework. This one is sorted differently: what genuinely blocks a build, what helps, and what people spend weeks on that nobody actually needs.
Blocking: the four things a build cannot start without
1. Domain access
Not just knowing what your domain is. Being able to log in to the registrar where it lives. This is the most common thing that delays a launch, because it is the thing nobody thinks about until the last day.
Track it down now. If you cannot find the login, start the recovery process today rather than the afternoon you want to go live. If a previous agency or a relative registered it, that conversation takes longer than you expect — and it is worth understanding why domain control matters so much before you have it.
2. Where your email is handled
If you use addresses at your own domain, changing where the website points can break email if the records are handled carelessly. Know which provider runs your mail. This is a five-minute conversation that prevents a genuinely bad day.
3. The decision maker's actual availability
Someone has to make the calls. If that person is unreachable for two weeks, the project is stopped regardless of how fast anyone builds. Better to start when you have a clear window than to start early and stall.
4. What you actually sell, in your own words
Not written copy. Just clarity: the list of services, roughly what each costs or ranges to, and who they are for. A conversation covers this — it does not need to arrive as a document.
Four items. Everything else on the traditional checklist improves the outcome without blocking the start.
High value: gather these if you can
Real photographs
The highest-leverage thing you can bring. Photos of your premises inside and out, your team, your equipment, and your actual finished work. Phone photos in good daylight beat stock imagery every time, because customers can tell the difference instantly and stock quietly signals that there is nothing worth showing.
If your work is visual — bodywork, hair, remodels, landscaping — before-and-after pairs are worth more than anything you could write.
Your logo in the original format
Ideally a vector file (.ai, .eps or .svg). Failing that, the largest PNG you have with a transparent background. A logo pulled off an old website at 200 pixels wide will look soft on a modern screen and there is no way to fix it after the fact.
The three reasons people choose you
Written down, in blunt language, without marketing polish. 'We're the only shop in town with the diagnostic equipment for European cars.' 'We handle the insurance paperwork so the customer doesn't have to.' 'We're open at 6am for shift workers.'
These are the sentences that end up doing the heaviest lifting on the site, and they are the hardest to extract later because they feel obvious from the inside.
Your five most common customer questions
Whatever you find yourself answering on the phone every week. Those questions are, almost by definition, what the website should be answering before the phone rings.
Access to your listings and accounts
- Google Business Profile — owned by you, with the builder added as a manager.
- Any analytics property, if one exists.
- The current website's admin, if there is one.
- Social accounts you want linked.
A short list of sites you like and dislike
Three or four of each, with one sentence on why. 'Dislike' examples are frequently more useful than 'like' ones, because they surface what you will react badly to.
Don't bother: what people over-prepare
Finished written copy
The single biggest cause of stalled projects. Business owners sit down to write their own pages, find it much harder than expected, and the project stops for a month.
Copy should come out of a conversation. Talking about your business for thirty minutes produces better raw material than three weekends of staring at a blank page, and it produces it in an afternoon.
A sitemap or page structure
Deciding your own page hierarchy up front usually reproduces whatever your old site did. That structure should follow from what the site is trying to achieve, and it is one of the things you are hiring someone to get right.
Keyword research
Well intentioned and rarely useful when done in isolation. Lists of high-volume terms with no relevance to your actual service area lead to pages nobody local will ever search for.
A detailed feature list
Arriving with a specification for a customer portal, a chat widget and a booking system is deciding the solution before anyone has examined the problem. Bring the problems instead — 'I lose bookings after hours', 'people call to ask my hours all day' — and let the features be argued for.
How we handle it
We ask for the four blocking items and run the rest as a conversation on the first call, which is also when you see a finished concept of your site. That order is deliberate: it is far easier to react to something real than to specify it in advance, and it means the preparation burden on you stays small.
If you have photographs and your logo files ready, bring them and the whole thing moves faster. If you have neither, we can still start — that is not a reason to wait another six months.