The process of having a website created is often more challenging and time-consuming than initially thought. It requires not only hiring a professional team to develop the website, but also active involvement from your own team to achieve the desired “wow effect.” In this article, I geek you out about the different phases and the time investment involved, and I share important considerations. The total duration of the project can vary depending on the size of the website, but on average you can expect a project duration of about 12 weeks.
The start-up of the project
The starting point of the project is essential to clearly define all your goals and ideas and set the right direction. Together with our team, you will determine what the website should look like, what pages it should contain, what content should go on each page, and you will create a mood board to gather and share inspiration. This immediately gives the website a visual direction. In this phase, you can count on about two weeks of work, spending about 3 hours on meetings and 4 hours on the creative process. If you already have a mood board or brand guidelines, you can significantly reduce these hours. Meetings in this phase include getting acquainted, sharing relevant information, asking crucial questions and creating a sitemap, which shows the structure of the various pages. The better you have this figured out in advance, the faster we can begin developing your website. It is important to note that at each stage, including this one, you can adjust the level of involvement and outsource certain tasks to your web design agency.
Meetings and feedback
During the process of having a website created, there are numerous touch points to discuss progress and exchange ideas. In addition, your team will be expected to collect internal feedback. Count on about 4 hours per week for meetings and gathering feedback. It is important to note that there is some flexibility because some meetings and feedback sessions may take more time than others. For example, approving wireframes may be faster than approving visual designs. This means that the time commitment can vary depending on the stage of the project and the complexity of the discussions.
Writing content
Content writing is often the phase where most time estimates are exceeded. Besides creating fluent sentences, checking grammar and adopting the right tone-of-voice, this is a challenging creative process. On average, you can assume that it takes about 4 to 5 hours to write one page. Of course, the number of hours required depends on the size and complexity of the page, as well as the important information you want to convey.
For example, a “contact page” and “home page” are often less labor intensive than writing an “about us” or “services page,” although the “home page” usually contains the most important information because it is the first thing people see when they visit your website. Moreover, after conducting keyword research, you can use certain high-performing keywords to make your website SEO-friendly. Modifying your texts to include these search terms requires attention and time. The writing process can also be outsourced to a professional agency that develops your website. In that case, you only need to provide the necessary information, which usually takes about 30 minutes per page.
Filling the website with content
It is possible to write the content directly in the backend of your website, but it is usually more convenient to do this first in a separate document and then post it on the website. The reason for this is that the website is often still under development at the time the texts are written. When posting content, you can count on about 3 hours per page. This includes inserting text, selecting the right images and adjusting text in buttons, for example. Careful content placement is important to ensure that the website looks professional and performs well.
The real work begins when the website is live.
Once the content is posted and your website is live, the real work actually begins. This is the time of trial and error. You’ll soon come across plenty of things you want to optimize, or you’ll get feedback from customers about your Web site. Continuing to optimize is an ongoing process that never really stops, and how much time you want to spend on it is entirely up to you. Marketing activities on your website, such as improving text, fine-tuning call-to-actions and expanding pages, also require attention and time. If you need advice or want help starting your marketing efforts, I’m here for you!
