The quote was signed in the spring. It is autumn now. The site has been "almost finished" for longer than it took to build.
Nobody is angry. The anger happened in June, once, for the length of one email. What there is now is quieter: nobody is expecting anything. The last message ended with "just give me a shout if you need anything", and that was three weeks ago. Both sides are certain the ball is with the other one.
Cards on the table
Building the site is usually the fastest part of the project. Design, templates, forms, the mobile layout, hosting: that work can be measured and planned. When a project has been stuck for four months, it is almost never stuck on that.
Four things actually hold a website project up:
- Words. What the pages actually say.
- Photos. What those pages get filled with.
- Decisions. Who says yes, and when.
- Access. Domain, hosting, accounts, the old site's passwords.
Three of those four sit with the client. The fourth, access, is shared: you grant the rights, and your supplier tells you exactly which ones they need.
This is not a complaint. It is true of almost every project, including the ones that end well. It simply does not get said before the contract, because it sounds like an excuse prepared in advance.
The words are not one evening's work
The plan is always the same: sit down one evening, write the text, send it over. Then that evening arrives. You open an empty document, type "About us" as a heading, and sit there for twenty minutes.
This is not laziness, and not a lack of writing skill. Writing the pages means deciding what you sell, to whom, and in what order. Nobody has done that work before, because on the phone you simply talk, and at the other end there is a person who already has the question. An empty document has nobody in it.
And your supplier cannot make those decisions for you. They do not know what you say to the customer who asks why it costs that much. Help exists: the words can be written and sorted out for you, but the input is still an hour of you talking, not an empty document.
One thing genuinely helps: do not write the whole site at once. Write the home page and one service page. Two pages, not twelve. Once those two exist the rest come more easily, because the tone and the length are settled and from there the work is editing rather than inventing. Twelve empty pages at once is the reason that document has been open for three months.
Photos: three routes, two of them slow
Stock photography gives you a site that looks like all the others. The same smiling team in the same glass-walled office you saw on another company's site last week. A reader cannot put it into words, but they can tell those pictures were not taken here.
Your own photos are the best. Your workshop, your machines, your own people. The catch is that they require a day, and somebody has to put that day in a calendar. A photographer, a time, a tidied room, clothes, weather, and one person who does nothing else that day. Agreeing that day is exactly where a spring project ends up in September.
The third route sounds like a compromise, which is why it is rarely offered. Start with stock and swap the pictures out once your own exist. The site goes live in August, the shoot happens in October, the photos are replaced in one afternoon. Stock pictures only need to be chosen carefully and licensed properly, which is a subject of its own.
Decisions: three deciders and no owner
A project with three deciders and no owner stops dead every time something needs approving.
From the outside it looks like this: the decision goes off to be discussed at your end and comes back only after the next meeting. From the inside it looks like this: none of the three wants to decide on behalf of the others, because that would be rude. So it gets discussed. And "let us talk it over between ourselves" is a sentence that never ends on its own.
The cure is uncomfortable and short: name one person who says yes, and give them the right to say it alone. Not to collect feedback, but to decide. The others may have opinions, but an opinion arrives before the agreed day or not at all. Most of these decisions are reversible anyway: the discussion almost always costs more than the decision itself.
Access: the most tedious part, and the one you can settle first
The domain. The hosting. The Google account with the analytics and the business listing. The login for the old site. The mail account the forms send from.
One of those has a password nobody has any more, because the person who set it up left three years ago. The domain is registered to their personal address.
Hunting for it mid-project costs weeks, because it does not depend on you: you write to somebody who does not answer, then to a registrar who wants a document, then you wait. The same hunt a month before the project starts costs a couple of phone calls, because nobody is in a hurry yet.
Make that list in the first week and check every line for real: log in, rather than assuming the password is somewhere. Even when somebody else looks after the site, the access should be in your name. Especially then.
And then our side of it
If everything so far reads as though only the client is at fault, this part has to be just as blunt. Some of the delay is the supplier's fault, and that must not be softened.
A vague scope. "A modern, user-friendly website" is not a scope. A scope is the number of pages, the number of forms, the number of languages, and a list of what the price does not include. Without that written down, the later argument is not about what is finished but about what was promised.
A timeline with no dates. "About a month, month and a half" is not a timeline. A timeline is dates, including the ones on your side.
Two weeks of silence. The most common failure and the cheapest to avoid. When a supplier is waiting for your text, they have two options: ask again, or say nothing. Saying nothing is more comfortable, because nobody wants to seem pushy. Two weeks later neither side has done a thing.
The "small change" that is not small. Some requests that sound tiny mean rebuilding the whole design. That has to be said when it is asked for, not on the invoice.
A good supplier does three things. They name the dates. They name what they need from you and by when. And they say in advance what waiting costs: not as a penalty, but so that you know what happens. If your pause collides with the start of their next project, the work does not resume where it stopped, it resumes only once their calendar frees up.
The thing that actually ends the stall
One thing ends these projects, and it is not a meeting. It is a content deadline with a consequence.
You agree a date. After it, the site goes live with whatever exists. A missing service page, a missing photo and a missing paragraph block nothing: the page arrives next week, and text that never came is replaced with what you wrote when you asked for the quote. Without a consequence, a deadline is not a deadline, it is a wish.
And this is where the arithmetic settles: a half-finished site that is live beats a finished one sitting in a folder. A page can be changed afterwards. An enquiry you never got cannot.
An honest note: a content deadline is better for the client than for the supplier. For us an endless project means an endless invoice, and the extra hours that accumulate on their own. For you it means the site you paid for in spring has brought in no customers by autumn. If the supplier does not offer that deadline, offer it yourself.
The same applies to a rebuild
Rebuilding an old site stalls on the same four things, with one addition: the old site works. It is not pretty and it does not bring in much, but it is live, and that removes the last of the pressure. The new version spends its fourth month waiting for text the old site already has, in outdated form. Take the old text, change what is wrong, and send it; rewriting can happen once the new site is running. Which route makes sense for you, new or repaired, is a separate decision, but the stall looks identical either way.
One question you can ask at any point
A website is not a product you buy. It is a project you take part in. That is uncomfortable, because buying would be simpler, but the site is largely made of things only you know.
And the question applies to us as much as to anybody else:
"What is this waiting on right now, and whose hands is it in?"
A good answer fits in one sentence and reaches one name. "Waiting on you for the text of two service pages, due Friday." Or: "Waiting on us, the forms are half done, ready Wednesday."
If the answer does not fit in one sentence and one name, the project is not stuck on the technical side. Ask it once a week, always in the same words. Most stalls do not survive that question. Ask it of us too, if you end up working with us.
Frequently asked questions
Rarely on the technical work. A project in its fourth month is usually waiting on four things: words, photos, decisions and access. The first three are produced inside the client's own building, and none of them can be handed to anyone else. The supplier's share of the delay is a vague scope, a timeline without dates, and staying quiet in a situation where asking again would have been cheaper.
The substance has to come from you. Your supplier does not sit in on your phone calls and has no idea how you answer a question about price. The writing itself can be bought as a job, but the raw material is still an hour of your talking. And do not take on the whole site in one go: once the home page and one service page exist, the tone is settled and the remaining pages come far faster.
Yes, and usually it pays. Agree a date after which the site is published exactly as it stands that morning: a missing page shows up the following week, a missing photo has a temporary one standing in for it. A deadline without that consequence is a wish rather than a deadline. And a published site is collecting enquiries while the perfect version is still in a folder.
One sentence: what is this waiting on, and whose hands is it in. A good answer fits in a single sentence, reaches a single name, and ends with a date. If the answer sprawls, the problem is not technical: nobody knows whose turn it is. Ask it once a week, always in exactly the same wording, including of your supplier.
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It is twenty to midnight and you are on the second page of the quote, the one that says what the number buys. Scope, prototype, staging, acceptance, change request. Here are those words in a sentence each, along with the ones a designer says beside a draft and the ones that arrive in the yearly domain letter. And the single word that costs the most.