We finished a website for a family-owned dispensary this summer. The first planning note is dated April 2 and the site went live on July 20. That’s 109 days, which sounds about right for a small business website redesign timeline.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
Then we went back and counted the days we actually worked on it. There were 16.
What the 16 days were
The first few days were homework. We read their old site top to bottom and wrote down everything that was wrong with it. The copyright in the footer still said 2014 to 2018. The education page sent you in a circle back to itself.
Somebody had also started a “new” site on their hosting account at some point. That one listed an address in Seattle and a phone number of 123-456-7890. It was a template nobody had filled in, and they were paying for it.
We looked at ten other dispensaries in the region to see what they were doing. Three of them had been bought up by big multi-state chains. That turned into the pitch for the whole site, because this shop is independent and family-run, and the site should say so up front.
The homepage got built in one day. We have seven saved changes from April 18 alone. The medical page, which matters most to them because medical patients are their best customers, came together that same day and got polished four days later.
After that it was a day here and a day there. A round of changes in May. Some forms in June. Two days in July to move it onto their real hosting and switch it on.
What the other 93 days were
Mostly, they were a small business being a small business.
Before launch we had a short list of things still outstanding. Final brand colors. The original logo file. A bio and a photo for one of the staff. New photos for the slideshow on the homepage. Login access to the hosting account, and a question about whether their email lived in the same place as the website.
None of that is unusual. Most small businesses have a list like that. The owner is busy running a store. The logo file is often on an old laptop somewhere, and the domain was often set up by someone who doesn’t work there anymore. These things can take weeks to shake loose, and nobody can build around them.
Why this matters to you
When a web shop quotes three or four months, you’d assume you’re paying for three or four months of work. Sometimes you are. More often you’re paying for the calendar, because a team is sitting on your project, waiting, and the invoice doesn’t know the difference.
We don’t charge for the calendar. Our pricing is per phase. You pay when a phase is done, and if we’re waiting on your logo for three weeks, that costs you nothing.
The part of the job that used to eat the calendar was the building itself. That’s the part we’ve gotten fast at. We use WordPress, because it’s what most small businesses can edit themselves after we leave, and we work alongside an AI that does a lot of the typing while we make the calls. The homepage took a day. Finding the logo file took longer.
How to shorten your website redesign timeline
You can make your own project shorter before you hire anyone. Here’s what we’d gather first:
- Your logo, in the original file your designer made, if you can find it
- Logins for your domain, your hosting, and your current site (if you’re not sure who holds your domain, ICANN Lookup will tell you)
- Who handles your email, and whether it’s tied to your website
- Current photos of your place, your people, and your product
- A list of what’s wrong with the site you have now, in your own words (this checklist helps)
If you show up with those, your 109 days might be 30.