Your website should only take five days to create

The reason you’re redesigning your website is simple: things have changed. You’re offering new services, you have a new brand positioning, or you’re trying to kickstart some SEO & paid advertising. You might even be just wanting to refresh your look (which isn’t a good reason, by the way). Now, it’s time to get the website redesigned!

Then what happens? You prepare your objectives for the website, put out the RFP and contact a few web agencies. The quotes come back. And how long will it take? It’ll take anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months (or more).

The reality is an agency may quote you 4 weeks, but in practice it will take 8. Why? Well, they don’t have the images. There’s copy that needs to be written. Oh, and did you send those feedback points? I can’t find that email, sorry can you send it again? Having been involved in dozens of web projects through the years, I’ve seen just about every reason why website projects take longer than they should.?

To be honest, I am confused why websites take so long. As a designer, building a site is actually quite easy, especially with the plethora of tools that make creating websites a piece of cake compared to even a decade ago. Aside from project management issues at some agencies, building a new website should actually be quite easy. Right??

The 4 Pins Problem

Most web projects are juggling 4 different pins at once: the actual visual design, the content, the brand story, and the user experience. These are often-solved in real-time: what’s the headline that should go here? What’s the imagery we should use? What are the brand colors? What’s the goal of the website?

The real reason websites take so long is they try to simultaneously solve brand problems and website problems. Brand problems are whether your positioning is right, whether the story you tell aligns with your target audience, whether the visual assets (like your logo) align with your prospect’s expectations of the industry.

When most companies start a website project, they’re actually trying to solve brand problems and leveraging a web agency to help them solve it. Instead of just building a service page, there are weeks of conversation about whether each service needs a sub-page and whether the button color is the right one. Then, the project gets delayed because the content that’s written doesn’t “sound right” and gets stuck on a key stakeholder’s desk.?

If you have dead-on positioning, a great brand story, and a visual standard for your company, the website designs itself. If you already know how your prospects should interact with your company and you know you need them to call you, not email you, the website user experience builds itself too.

Sure, there are little technical details about whether one header size is bigger than another or whether an image background or a color background makes sense. But those details take minutes, not weeks, to resolve.?

The Five Day Website

For a number of years, we offered a standalone service where I implemented these insights into our web projects at Artichoke Studio. We would build entirely custom websites in just 5 days for our normal fee. There would be no website, no design mocks, hardly even a design framework (aside from the brand standard) when the “Build Week” would begin. By Friday, there was a client-reviewed and client-approved website ready to launch.

The reason this process worked was we required clients to have the discipline to do all the preparation work needed to make the website process easy. Good project management will reduce the build time by a couple weeks; good branding & positioning will reduce the build time by months.

The most frequent hurdle in getting a website off the ground is content. We required that clients would have all the content completed in advance of the build week, and if they were not going to provide the content internally we recommended a copywriter to write it for them. Once the content was in place and the brand strategy was ready, the website could be built.

If you’re considering a website redesign, you are not ready until you have the following identified:

• What is the #1 action I want visitors to take? This is usually a conversion goal and is often calling, emailing, or submitting a form.
• What is the #1 feeling I want visitors to experience? This is a brand goal and is informed by your brand story and target audience. Do you want them to be impressed, comforted, validated, or even laughing-out-loud?
• What is the #1 insight I want visitors to know about my firm compared to my competitors? This is also a brand goal and is informed by your positioning. If you don’t have strong positioning, this will be a hard question to answer.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’re still not ready to build a website. You will still need to write the content (or hire someone to do so), decide on why someone should visit your website, and how you will steward the relationship from website visitor to return client. Then, you’re ready to build.

Your website is just one of many guideposts in the customer buying journey. Even if there are many “sub-steps” like clicking a specific button or reading a specific article on your website, think of your website as one of many larger steps in the journey from prospect to loyal client. There are many things that should and will happen once a prospect leaves your website.

Next time you talk with a web agency, ask them if they can build the site in five days. I’d be eager to hear what they say.