Let’s answer that properly, because the honest list is shorter than you fear, and one item on it is more important than people think.
First, what you don’t need to prepare
You don’t need to write anything. Not a word. The single biggest reason website projects stall is the owner staring at a blank page marked “About Us”, and we removed that job from you on purpose: we write every page. So if you’ve been putting off getting in touch until you’ve “written something up”, stop putting it off. There’s nothing to write up.
You also don’t need a design in mind, a sitemap, or any technical vocabulary. Arriving with “I don’t really know what I need” is a perfectly good brief. Working that out together is the first job.
The conversation is the plan
What we actually need from you is a conversation, and the best preparation is simply mulling a few questions beforehand. What does your business actually do, in the words you’d use to a neighbour? Who are your customers, and what do they ask you every single week? What makes someone choose you over the bloke two villages over? And what should the website achieve: the phone ringing, bookings, orders, or just looking respectable when someone checks up on you?
You don’t need polished answers. Half-formed and honest beats rehearsed every time. The conversation usually takes an hour, ideally with tea.
The bits and bobs
There’s a small pile of practical things to gather, and hunting them down early saves delays later:
- Your domain name details: do you own it, and who has the login? (You’d be amazed how many businesses don’t know. If that’s you, say so; untangling it is a job we know well)
- Logins for your current website and hosting, if a site already exists
- Your logo, in the biggest version you’ve got. No logo is also fine; that’s a conversation
- Photos: real ones of you, your work, your premises. Imperfect and genuine beats glossy stock, and phone photos are often plenty. No photos at all? We’ll sort something
- The boring essentials: exact business name, address, and anything your trade requires you to display
If you want a shop: the spreadsheet gospel
Now the item that saves real money, so it gets its own sermon.
A shop is built from your product list, and the form that list arrives in decides a chunk of the price. What we want is one spreadsheet: a row per product, with columns for the name, the price, the category, sizes or variations if there are any, roughly how much it weighs (postage cares), and the matching photo’s filename. Add a scrappy notes column with anything worth knowing about the product, and we’ll spin those notes into proper descriptions; that part stays our job.
From a sheet like that, two hundred products flow into the shop in one careful import. Without it, each product is typed in by hand, one at a time, and you’re paying for every one of those minutes. The spreadsheet is unglamorous, it’ll take you an afternoon with the radio on, and it’s the best-paid afternoon of the whole project.
Alongside it: your delivery arrangements (who delivers, where to, what you charge) and how you’d like to take payment, even if the answer is “however’s normal”.
And one quiet decision
Decide who has the final say. One voice. Committees are welcome to opinions, and charities especially will have them, but every project moves at the speed of its slowest yes, and a single decision-maker is the difference between weeks and months.
That’s the whole list. A conversation, a carrier bag of bits, one afternoon’s spreadsheet if you’re selling, and a named decider. Bring those, and we’ll bring everything else.
