Anywhere from two to three weeks for a simple site, two to three months for a complex one — and the honest answer almost always depends on you as much as on us.
Timeline is one of the first questions every business owner asks, usually right after price. Both questions have the same honest answer: it depends on what you’re building. A clean five-page brochure site for a local business is a different timeline than a multi-location healthcare site with online forms, integrations, and HIPAA considerations. They’re both “websites,” but the calendars are very different.
To set a baseline:
These are real ranges based on real projects, not best-case scenarios we use to win the deal and then quietly slip later. If we tell you four weeks, we’re planning around four weeks.
Same factors that drive cost, more or less:
Honestly? It’s usually content. Almost every web project that runs late runs late because the written copy, photos, logos, staff bios, service descriptions, or product details aren’t ready when we need them. The design phase moves fast. The build phase moves fast. Then we hit the “send us your content” step, and the project sits for three weeks while someone hunts down headshots.
If you want a fast launch, the single best thing you can do is have your content ready before kickoff — or be honest with us up front that you need help creating it, so we can build content production into the timeline rather than discovering the gap halfway through.
Here’s roughly how the calendar breaks down on a standard project:
Sometimes, yes. We’ve turned around urgent projects in less than two weeks when the situation called for it — usually a new business that needed something live before a launch event, or a replacement for a hacked or broken site. Rushed timelines work best when the scope is tight, the content is ready, and the client can turn around approvals quickly. They don’t work well when any of those three are missing.
Launch isn’t the end — it’s the beginning. Most of our clients have us on retainer for ongoing changes, security updates, and content additions. You can also handle all of that yourself (more in your ability to update the site yourself). Either way, “the site is live” doesn’t mean “the work is over.” Good websites evolve with the business.
Three things tend to come up together: timeline, cost, and the “will I be happy with it” question. We’ve got dedicated articles on all three — see how much web design costs and whether we can guarantee you’ll be happy with the site. Together they paint the full picture of how a project actually runs.
Two to three weeks for simple, two to three months for complex, with everything in between landing somewhere on that spectrum. The fastest way to a faster launch is having content ready and making timely decisions during the design phase. We’ll give you a real timeline before we start — not a wish list.