Commissioning a website is a significant investment for any organisation, an investment of money (here’s a guide to what a website costs), but also of time and trust. Done well, it will set you up for years. Done badly, it can cost considerably more to unpick than it would have done to get right first time around.

Most guides to commissioning a website cover the same ground: have a brief, choose an agency, go through discovery, design, build, launch. All of which makes sense and we’ll cover it here. But the things that actually make the difference; the decisions that determine whether a project goes smoothly or doesn’t tend not to get written about. This is largely because they involve real friction, real mistakes, and specific judgements that generic advice can’t cover off.

This is our version of the guide, based on what we’ve learnt from the projects we’ve been part of over the last decade +.

The goldmine you’re sitting on: your analytics

Before you start: use what you already have (for more on what analytics to track have a read of this piece).

Most organisations have more useful data about their audience than they realise before starting a new website project, data which can make a real difference in achieving your goals. In most cases though they either haven’t realised what they already have access to, or just haven’t looked at it through the lens of a website brief.

Your Google Analytics 4 account is where we recommend beginning. Before you speak to any agency, here are a few specific things to check:

1. Engagement rate on your key service pages. What you can expect will vary by your industry but as a general rule you want it to be above 50%. If it’s less than this it’s telling you people are landing on those pages and not finding what they need. What this tells you is you have a content problem which, now you know about, you can solve with your new site rather than replicate.
2. Average engagement time. Very low times across the board (under 30 seconds for instance) suggests people are arriving, not seeing what they’re looking for, and so leaving. High times on one or two pages tell you what people actually value. Being aware of this before your project kicks off means you know which pages to carry through to your new site as they are and which need more work from a design and / or content perspective.
3. Top landing pages and traffic sources. Which pages are people finding you through? Which channels are sending the most visits? Knowing your top landing pages is crucial – you need to know what to protect in your new website build and what is worth trying to improve.

If you use social media as an organisation then it’s very much worth also analysing these numbers before writing your website brief. Your stats here will give you an additional layer to your website analytics: which content generates saves, shares or comments (as opposed to just likes), which in turn tells you what your audience finds genuinely useful. That’s what your website content should reflect and what your website agency will value knowing.

Carving our time with this data before you brief an agency will save weeks of iteration later. It also makes you a better client because you’re bringing intelligence to the brief, not just instinct or your own personal preferences (not always the same as you customers).

What the website design (and build) process should look like

(and what it actually involves)

The sequence of a website project is usually presented as something along the lines of Discovery → Design → Development → Launch. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, this is the process we follow too. It’s what happens within each stage – and whether an agency does it properly – which is where projects succeed or fail and which we’ll go into now.

1. Understanding before designing. Before any design work begins, a good agency spends time understanding your organisation, your sector, your goals, your audience and, very importantly, what hasn’t worked before. This isn’t a box-ticking exercise; it’s where assumptions get challenged and what’s possible is revealed. We’ve had many clients arrive with a clear idea of what they want built, only for the conversation to take us in a different direction, one which enables us to exceed, not merely meet, expectations. This conversation is only possible if the agency is asking the right questions and spending time listening to and absorbing your answers, rather than rushing to show you design options.
2. Outcome led design. The visual direction and structure of your site, by which we mean how it looks, how it’s navigated, and how it communicates should come directly from the understanding stage. Design that isn’t grounded in a clear understanding of the user and the goal tends to look fine (sometimes even great) but perform poorly and not stand the test of time.
3. A build that lasts. Every website we develop is custom-built, completely tailored to the client. Templates absolutely have their place and we are not against them on principle, but as with anything they have their limitations and you should be aware of these before you commit. We’ve had clients come to us after spending significant money on template builds only to find themselves constrained as their business changed but their template couldn’t grow with them. A custom build costs more upfront. It can cost considerably less over time.
4. Testing before launch. Before anything goes live, thorough testing across devices, browsers and screen sizes is non-negotiable. Accessibility, speed and security all also need to be checked. A site that launches with problems is harder to recover than one that launches a few days late.

How long to build a new website?

The flippant answer to this is how long is a piece of string. And, to a large extent it really does depend on what else is going on (is the project starting in the middle of the school holidays), the budget and the complexity. Commonly a realistic timeframe for a well-scoped project is 8–16 weeks from brief to launch.

Sign-off and stakeholders

The sign off process and the stakeholders involved in that process can often become a source of tension which delays a website project.

Before you kick off your project we recommend you agree internally on two things: who has the final say, and who needs to be involved at each stage. If those two questions don’t have clear answers before work starts, it’s generally the case that the project will find them out the hard way.

Too many decision-makers with equal standing is one of the most reliable ways to derail a design process. When five people have veto power and different opinions, feedback rounds stop being about whether the work meets the brief and start being about whose preferences win. This causes you friction and means the design drifts. This in turn means costs increase. The agency can then then be left in the awkward position of managing internal politics rather than building your website.

The clients who get the best outcomes tend to nominate one person as the primary point of contact. This is someone with the authority to make decisions and the access to gather feedback from others before it reaches the agency. This doesn’t at all mean other voices don’t matter; it simply means they’re consolidated before they arrive, not after.

It’s also worth thinking about who needs to approve work at each stage and making sure those people know they’re involved before the project kicks off. Late-stage feedback from someone who wasn’t in the room earlier, for example a senior stakeholder who “just wants a quick look,” or a board member who sees the design for the first time at launch is one of the most common and avoidable sources of cost overruns and delay.

A good agency will ask you about this upfront. If they don’t, raise it yourself.

SEO: a build consideration, not a retrofit

Search engine optimisation, because it’s seen as work which happens to a website, and because it isn’t always delivered by the people which designed and built that website, sometimes fails to feature in initial discussions and planning. However, it should absolutely be part of the conversation from the first as opposed to treated as a separate project added after launch (even if your ongoing SEO work is delivered by another agency).

Factoring in SEO from the start will prevent the design and build of your new website having to be amended later to accommodate your SEO requirements and help you ensure maximum effectiveness from the get go. Launching a site and then commissioning a separate SEO project to fix what the build didn’t consider is almost always more expensive and less effective.

If you don’t know what you’re going to need, or if SEO is even going to be an area you invest in what should you look for? As a minimum, any new website should be built with basic technical SEO in place. By which we mean: clean URL structures, proper meta titles and descriptions, fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and correct heading hierarchy.

Beyond the technical baseline, how much SEO shapes a build will depend on your goals and sector. For example, if organic search is a key acquisition channel for you then it’s worth discussing content strategy as part of the project: which pages you need, what queries they should target, and how the site structure supports that from day one.

What to watch out for: how to choose a web agency

A few questions worth asking before you commit.

Do they ask good questions before they talk about design? As we talked about earlier, the understanding stage is crucial to success. A good first meeting with an agency can feel a little like you’re the interviewee as well as the interviewer, which is exactly right. A collaborative partnership can only be built from this. Expect to be asked things like:

• What does success look like for this project?
• Who is your audience and what do they currently think of you?
• What has frustrated you most about your existing site?
• What are your competitors doing online that you admire, or don’t admire?
• Who on your team needs to be involved in decisions?
• What integrations do you need, eg.CRM, booking, payment?
• How is the organisation planning to grow over the next two or three years?

These questions aren’t filler or an agency being nosy for the sake of it. They’re how a good agency builds the understanding that prevents expensive surprises further down the line. An agency that skips them and gets straight to talking about what the site could look like is telling you something important about how they work.

Do they build custom or use templates? Know what you’re buying. There’s a place for template-based builds, but understand the trade-offs before you agree to one.

Are timelines and costs clear? Vague answers to “what’s included?” and “how long will it take?” are a warning sign. You should have a clear scope and a fixed or clearly structured cost before work begins.

Who is doing the work? Some agencies present their own team and outsource the delivery. This isn’t necessarily wrong but you should be aware of who you’ll be working with day to day. This isn’t just a due diligence question, a website design and build is a surprisingly intimate process. You’ll be sharing your strategy, your brand, your frustrations, and sometimes your internal politics. The people working on your project will spend months inside your organisation’s thinking. Knowing who they are, being able to speak to them directly, and trusting their judgement matters more than most clients expect it to, that’s until they’re in a project where it’s missing.

What makes the difference

The agencies that deliver the best results operate as an extension of your team: asking the right questions, communicating clearly, and telling you what’s right for your project rather than what’s easiest for them.

That’s what we mean by done properly.

Get in touch to talk about your website project, or take a look at some of the work we’ve delivered (io consulting, Cratus Group)to see what that looks like in practice.