Find out who controls your domain
This blocks more launches than every other item on this list put together, and it is always discovered late.
Your domain lives at a registrar. Somebody has that login. Sometimes it is you. Often it is a nephew who set the site up in 2019, or a previous marketing company, or an email address at a job somebody left.
Do this today, before you talk to anybody about a website. Run a public WHOIS lookup on your domain to see the registrar, then confirm you can log in. If you cannot, start the recovery process now, because it involves support tickets and identity checks and it takes days.
The nightmare version: a designer registered it under their own account, the relationship ended badly, and now your business address on the internet belongs to somebody who is not returning calls. We register domains in the client's name for exactly this reason, and our terms say the domain is yours regardless of anything else.
Know where your email lives
The scariest thirty minutes in this job is pointing a domain at a new site and taking down a company's email by accident.
Your website and your email can both run on the same domain while living in completely different places. The DNS records that route mail are separate from the ones that route web traffic, and a careless cutover wipes them.
Write down what you use: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, an old host's mail server, or something a previous provider set up that nobody has looked at in years. Hand that over at the start. It takes you five minutes and removes the single highest-consequence risk in the whole project.
Write your service list the way customers say it
Not the way your industry says it. Customers do not search for "exterior envelope remediation", they search for "roof leak".
List everything you do and sell, in plain words, ordered by what you most want more of. That ordering is a strategic decision and it shapes the whole site, because it determines which pages exist and which one the navigation leads with.
Mark anything you would rather stop doing. Leaving it off the site is the cheapest way to get less of it.
Photos: what to shoot and what to skip
Real photos of your actual work beat stock, always, even when the stock is better lit. People can tell, and in a small market some of them recognize the job.
Worth shooting: finished work, work in progress, your team, your vehicles, your building from the road. Before and after pairs if your work has a visible before.
Not worth shooting: a laptop on a desk, a handshake, anything you could buy for $8 from a stock library. If it could belong to any business in your industry, it is decoration and it is taking up space where proof should be.
Send originals, not the versions your phone compressed into a text message. We handle the resizing and the formats.
Your proof
Every claim on the site is stronger with something specific next to it.
- Reviews you already have, with names, and the link to where they live.
- Numbers you can stand behind. Years in business, jobs completed, response time.
- Named clients you have permission to name.
- Licenses, bonding, insurance, certifications.
- Anything a competitor cannot say. That is the sentence the whole homepage should be built around.
Only send proof you can defend. An invented number is a liability that sits on the page forever.
Analytics and Search Console access
If your existing site has Google Analytics or Search Console attached, get access before the rebuild rather than after.
The reason is not reporting. It is that the existing data tells us which of your current pages actually earn traffic, and those are the ones whose URLs have to survive the move. Rebuilding without that history means guessing at which redirects matter, and a missed redirect on a page that was ranking is a real, permanent loss.
No analytics at all? That is fine and common. We set them up. Just say so rather than assuming somebody did it.
Decide who signs off
One person. Their taste is the taste.
Two owners with different opinions is workable. Four people, one of whom is a spouse with strong feelings about the color green, is how a two-week project becomes a two-month one. Every round of consolidated feedback costs a day. Every round of contradictory feedback costs three.
Whoever it is, they need to be reachable during the build. A decision-maker on vacation in week two is a paused project.
The one-page pre-flight list
Print this. Tick it before you sign anything.
- Domain registrar name, and confirmed working login.
- Where email is hosted.
- Any existing website login, if there is one.
- Analytics and Search Console access, if they exist.
- Service list in plain language, ordered by priority.
- Photos, originals, in one folder.
- Logo files, the original vector version if you have it.
- Reviews, numbers and credentials.
- One named decision-maker.
- Two or three websites you like, with one sentence each on why.
That last one is worth more than people expect. "I like this one" tells us nothing. "I like that the price is on the first screen" tells us everything.