You hire a web designer. Great. You’re excited, maybe a little relieved, maybe already picturing the finished site on your phone. Then they send over a message asking for your content, branding, photos, logins, product info, and a few “quick details” about your business.
And suddenly it gets weirdly hard.
Because most website delays don’t happen from coding. They happen because the business owner hasn’t sent the stuff the designer actually needs to begin. Or they send half of it. Or it arrives across 19 WhatsApp messages, 4 emails, and one blurry photo of a price list from 2021. I’ve seen this kill a launch.
If you want your project to move fast – and not turn into a month of back-and-forth – here’s what to send before your web designer starts, plus the bits people almost always forget.
Start with the boring stuff first
Not glamorous. Still matters.
Your designer needs the practical foundation before they can build anything useful. If you’re getting a standard business site or a custom WordPress website, send this early. Day one, ideally.
- Your business name, contact details, and service area – exact spelling, phone number, email, address, opening hours, whatever should appear on the site.
- Your domain and hosting details – or at least tell them where the domain is registered and who currently manages hosting.
- Any existing website logins – WordPress, hosting panel, domain registrar, Cloudflare, Google accounts if relevant.
- Your legal pages – privacy policy, cookie policy, returns policy if you sell online.
- One main point of contact – not three business partners all sending seperate feedback.
That last one saves alot of pain, honestly. A website project gets messy fast if one person wants “clean and modern,” another wants “louder,” and a third one keeps emailing random examples at 11:40 pm.
Send your content. Real content. Not “we’ll add it later”
This is the big one.
A designer can make a homepage look nice with placeholder text for a while. But they can’t build a website that actually sells your service if all they’ve got is “Lorem ipsum” and a promise that proper copy is coming soon. It usually doesn’t. Or it arrives late, rushed, and twice as long as the layout allowed.
Here’s what to send instead:
- Homepage copy – what you do, who you help, where you work, and what you want visitors to do next.
- About page text – your story, but keep it human. Not a life memoir.
- Service page text – what’s included, who it’s for, rough pricing if you share that, and what makes you different.
- FAQs – these are gold. They answer objections and help with SEO too.
- Calls to action – “Book a quote,” “Call now,” “Order online,” “Send an enquiry.” Be clear.
If writing this stuff makes you want to fake your own disappearance, fair enough. But don’t dodge it. Even rough notes are better than nothing. A decent designer or SEO person can shape rough notes into something readable. A blank page? Nope.
And if you’re still not sure what type of content helps your pages get found, this guide on why nobody’s finding your blog posts explains the problem in plain English.
Photos matter more than people think
You do not need a fancy photoshoot for every small business website. Let’s calm down. But you do need images that don’t make your business look half-asleep.
If you’re a local service business, send:
– team photos
– your shop, office, van, or workspace
– examples of finished work
– a headshot of the owner
– any product or process photos you already use on social media
Phone photos can be fine now, really. Modern phones are good enough if the lighting’s decent and the picture isn’t taken while jogging. But please, avoid screenshots from Instagram, tiny logos pulled from Facebook, and images with text already baked into them.
No designer can make a 400-pixel blurry image look premium. They can crop it cleverly. That’s about it.
Your branding pack – even if it’s very basic
If you already have a logo, send the original file types if you can. SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, transparent PNG. Those are useful. A logo pasted into a Word document is… less useful.
You should also send:
- brand colors
- fonts, if you use specific ones
- business card designs or flyers
- social media graphics
- any brand guidelines, even simple ones
If your branding is inconsistent, tell your designer now, not halfway through. A lot of small businesses are still using three different logos from three different years. It happens. If that’s you, fixing the identity first can save time later, and a proper logo and branding setup usually costs far less than rebuilding a weird-looking website twice.
For online stores, product info is where projects go to die
If you’re building a WooCommerce store, product prep is the part people underestimate every single time.
They think the site build is the hard part. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the real monster is a spreadsheet with 47 products, no categories, missing weights, five duplicate SKUs, and prices that don’t match the physical shop.
Before your designer starts an online store, send:
– product names
– prices
– SKU codes if you use them
– product descriptions
– sizes, colors, and other variations
– weights and dimensions for shipping
– product photos
– stock levels
– shipping rules
– payment options you want to offer
If you’ve got more than 20 products, put this in a spreadsheet. Please. Not in separate emails.
And if you’re still deciding how much is too much for your first store, this article on how many products is too many for one online store is worth a read. Short version? A tidy 12-product store often sells better than a chaotic 300-product one.
Examples you like – but use them properly
Design inspiration helps. Random link dumping doesn’t.
Send 3 to 5 websites you like and explain why you like them. Not just “make it like this.” Maybe you like the clean menu. Maybe the booking form is simple. Maybe the product pages feel easy to scan.
That context matters because your designer shouldn’t be copying another website. They should be understanding your taste and the kind of customer experience you’re after.
Also, be realistic. If you’re a one-person electrician in Tartu, sending five examples from giant US tech companies isn’t all that helpful. Nice websites, wrong planet.
What people forget almost every time
This is the sneaky stuff. The tiny missing pieces that hold everything up.
Review quotes and testimonials. These build trust fast, especially for service businesses. Send the customer’s first name, business name if allowed, and where the review came from.
Your booking or enquiry process. What happens after someone fills out the form? Do they get a call, an email, a calendar link? If you don’t know, the website can’t guide people properly.
Social links. Obvious, yet somehow often forgotten.
Email setup. If your contact form should send to hello@yourdomain.com but that inbox doesn’t exist yet, that’s a problem.
SEO basics. Your page titles, target locations, and services. You don’t need a giant strategy document, but your designer should know whether you want to rank for “wedding florist in Pärnu” or “car detailing in Tallinn.”
Who approves what. If approval takes a week every round because no one knows who decides, your 2-week build turns into six. Easy.
How much prep is enough?
You don’t need to arrive with a 38-page brand manual and a perfect content pack polished to death. That’s overkill for a 5-page site.
But you do need enough for the designer to make good decisions without guessing. As a rough guide:
– For a small brochure site, expect 2 to 4 hours gathering your basics, content, and images
– For a small WooCommerce store, more like 6 to 12 hours if products need organizing
– For a bigger rebuild with messy old content, maybe a full day or two spread across a week
That prep time is normal. It’s part of the project, even if nobody likes admitting it.
The simple way to make this painless
Create one folder in Google Drive or Dropbox. Put everything there. Name files clearly. “Final-logo-black.png” is good. “IMG_8837_NEW_USETHIS2.png” is not.
Then make one single doc with:
- your sitemap or planned pages
- copy for each page
- contact details
- notes on design preferences
- anything still missing, with a date you’ll send it
That one document can shave days off a project. Maybe more.
Last thing – don’t wait until launch week
This is where people trip themselves up. They hire the designer first, then start looking for photos, rewriting service descriptions, chasing product prices, asking the business partner for logo files, and trying to remember the domain login from 2019.
Do the prep first, or at least start it before the project begins. Your designer will work faster, the site will be better, and you’ll avoid that awkward “just checking in on the content” email nobody enjoys.
And once the site is live, keep it looked after. A build is one job. Keeping WordPress healthy is another. If you’ve ever been tempted to ignore updates for months, read what happens if you never update WordPress. It’s less dramatic than a full hack cleanup, but only just.
Get your files together. Write the rough copy. Send the photos. Future you will be very grateful.