Planning a Business Website From First Idea to Launch

Serious about results?

Commissioning a new website, or finally fixing the one you’ve got? Do the thinking before any money changes hands. The steps below run in roughly the order they come up in real projects, starting with whether you need a rebuild at all and ending with launch day, when the main job is not losing the search visibility you already have. Where something deserves more space, there’s a link to a longer article.

In brief

Decide what the site is for, and how you’ll know it’s working, before anybody talks colours.
Plan the pages and write most of the words early. Designers do their best work with real copy.
Build to WCAG 2.2 AA whatever size you are, and pick a platform on who’ll run it, not on the demo.
Replacing an old site? Map every old URL to a new one and leave the redirects up for a long time.

Do you need a new website or a redesign?

A tired website isn’t always a broken one. Quite often it’s a decent site carrying two or three irritating faults. Picture a heating engineer whose phone number sits below three paragraphs of welcome text, or a solicitors’ practice whose contact form stopped sending emails last spring without anyone noticing. Neither of those is likely to need a rebuild. They need a morning with someone who knows where to look.

Some problems go deeper, and patching won’t fix them. You can’t change a word on the site without phoning a developer. The platform it runs on is no longer supported. It falls apart on a phone. Or the business has moved on so far that the site now describes somebody else. The phone point matters more than most owners realise, because Google uses the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking, so if the site only really works on a desktop you’re being judged on its weaker half. We go through the usual symptoms in our article on the warning signs that a website needs a redesign, and if you’re making the call this year, whether your business needs a new website in 2026 looks at what tends to tip it.

Before you speak to anyone, try this. Write down everything about the site that bothers you, then label each item content, function or foundation. Mostly content? Rewrite the pages first and see how far that gets you. Mostly foundation? Stop patching, because keeping it alive will cost you more than starting again.

Setting goals you can measure and turning them into a brief

“We want a modern website” isn’t a goal. It’s a preference, and nobody can measure it. A goal sounds more like “more quote requests for commercial jobs” or “fewer calls asking what time we open”, and that gives everyone something to aim at and something to check six months down the line.

The useful goals are tied to something a visitor actually does on the site. A physio clinic probably wants online bookings, while for a wholesaler it’s trade account applications. Charities often want two things at once, volunteers and regular donors. Google Analytics 4 lets you mark the actions you care about as key events, which Google describes as a way to measure the things that matter to your business and see which marketing channels bring them in. Agree what counts before launch. Otherwise the numbers you’re staring at in six months won’t mean much. Our guide to getting more enquiries from your website picks this up in more detail.

Now put it in a brief. Short is fine, vague isn’t. Who’s the site for, and what are they trying to get done? What are the goals? Which pages or features do you already know you need? If it has to talk to other systems, like a booking tool, a CRM or a stock feed, list them. Say who’ll be updating it once it’s live, roughly what you want to spend and any dates that can’t move. Then add two or three sites you like, with a line on why. “I like how their pricing is laid out” tells a designer far more than a bare link ever will. Want a ballpark before you write a word? The free website estimate on our home page gives you an indicative figure from a few questions.

Planning structure and navigation before design

Structure is just the list of pages, how they’re grouped and how people get from one to another. Get it sorted before design starts. Menus, templates and content all hang off it, and changing it halfway through is where a lot of rework comes from.

Start with the questions customers ask you, then group them. An electrician might end up with a services section holding a page for each type of job (rewires, EV chargers, inspections), plus an area page or two if they cover several towns. An online shop needs categories that match how buyers think, which isn’t always how the warehouse labels things. A B2B manufacturer is different again. It might need sections for industries served, capabilities and technical documents, because different people in the buying team go looking for different things.

Google’s starter guide suggests keeping similar pages together in directories and using URLs with real words in them rather than strings of numbers. Something like /services/boiler-repair/ tells people and search engines what’s coming before the page even loads. Plan the links between pages too. Descriptive link text tells visitors and Google what’s on the other side. There’s more on how structure affects search in our guide to SEO for business websites.

And keep the main menu short. People are usually after one of a handful of things. Give them fourteen top-level items and all of them get harder to find.

Content and copy come first

Late content is one of the usual suspects when a web project runs over. Pages get designed around dummy text. A layout built for three short paragraphs suddenly has to hold twelve long ones. The “About us” page is still being written the night before launch.

Writing early forces decisions you’d otherwise dodge. Get a dental practice to explain its treatments in plain English and it quickly finds out which questions patients ask most, and which pages need prices, finance options or before-and-after information. A letting agent that writes separately for landlords and tenants soon realises they need different routes through the site.

Google’s guidance on helpful content says its ranking systems aim to put helpful, reliable information made to benefit people ahead of content made to game the rankings. It asks you to think about who made the content, how, and above all why it exists. For a business site that boils down to some fairly ordinary habits. Write for the person who’s about to pick up the phone, and answer the questions they actually ask. Show who’s behind the business. Don’t publish pages whose only job is repeating a keyword. And if AI tools help you draft, check every claim and rewrite it in your own words, because the knowledge that makes a page useful is the bit only you have.

Design fundamentals, including typography, images and accessibility

Good design on a business site mostly comes down to being easy to read and easy to act on. The look matters. It just sits on top of some duller decisions that matter more.

Typography and readability

Body text has to be comfortable on a phone, with enough size, line spacing and contrast that nobody’s squinting. WCAG 2.2 asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text, and for text that can be resized up to 200 percent without losing content or function. That pale grey on white might look classy in a mock-up. It often fails the contrast test.

Images

Real photos of your premises, your people and your work beat stock images for trust, whether you run a restaurant, a garden centre or an engineering firm. Google notes that high-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear ones, and suggests putting images near the text they relate to. Every meaningful image needs ‘alt text’, the short description a screen reader reads out and Google uses to understand the picture. Say what’s actually in the shot. Stuffing it with keywords is a bad idea, and Google warns it can make a site look spammy.

Accessibility as a benchmark

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines come from the W3C, and version 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. Level AA is the sensible target for a business website. A few of the 2.2 additions matter on everyday sites. Anything people tap or click should be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels (there are some exceptions). Help options should sit in the same relative order from page to page. And nobody should have to type the same information twice in one process.

In the UK, public sector bodies (unless exempt) have to meet WCAG 2.2 AA under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, and publish an accessibility statement. Those regulations don’t generally cover private businesses. That’s not the end of it, though. In England, Scotland and Wales, the Equality Act 2010 puts a duty to make reasonable adjustments on anyone providing a service to the public, and government guidance points out that all UK service providers have that obligation, under the Equality Act or, in Northern Ireland, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. Treat that as general information rather than legal advice. In practice the answer’s simple. Building to WCAG 2.2 AA from day one costs far less than bolting it on later, and you usually end up with a site that works better for everyone. Our long read on web design best practises goes further into layout, hierarchy and usability.

Choosing a platform

Picking a platform is really picking who’ll look after the site and what it needs to do. There isn’t one right answer. If someone insists there is before they’ve asked a single question about your business, they’re selling you something.

WordPress is open source software released under the GPL (version 2 or later), so you’re free to run, study, modify and redistribute it. In plain terms, you can move the site to another host or another developer without anyone’s permission, and there are plenty of people who know how to work on it. It suits sites with custom features, lots of content, or connections to other systems. The downside is upkeep. Somebody has to keep the core software, theme and plugins up to date, which is why plenty of owners hand that over with a WordPress care plan rather than doing it themselves.

Hosted website builders bundle the software, hosting and security updates into one monthly fee. If you’re a sole trader after five pages and a contact form, or a café that just needs a menu and opening times, that can be the right call. The problems tend to turn up later. You want a feature the builder doesn’t do. Or you try to leave and discover your design, and some of your content, has to stay behind. Before you sign up, find out how you’d export your content, what happens to the site if you stop paying, and whether the features you’ll want in three years actually exist.

Choosing and briefing an agency, and reading the quotes

With a brief in hand you can compare suppliers like for like. Look at work they’ve done for businesses about your size and complexity. Ask who’ll actually build it, who’ll support it, and what happens once it’s live. Our questions to ask a prospective web design agency will get those conversations going. If you’re torn between a large outfit and a smaller one, choosing between a big agency and a trusted partner looks at how the experience differs. And you’re welcome to browse our portfolio of website work.

Two quotes for what sounds like the same website can be miles apart. The gap is usually in what’s included. Is content writing in there? Photography, search setup and redirects from your old site? What about training, hosting and support after launch? Check whether each is in the price or an extra, and whether you’ll own the design and the domain at the end. Our guide on how to read a web design quote points out the lines worth a second look.

The redesign process stage by stage, and protecting your rankings

Most projects follow roughly the same path, whatever each agency calls the stages. Discovery pins down the goals, the audience and what the site has to do. Then structure and content planning, which gives you a sitemap and the copy. Design turns that into page layouts, usually starting with the templates that matter most. The build puts it into the platform, followed by testing on real phones and browsers, accessibility checks and a run through every form. Then you launch, and spend the next while watching the numbers and fixing whatever real visitors trip over.

One bit that often goes wrong on a redesign is the switchover. Change your page addresses without telling search engines where the old pages went and years of built-up visibility can vanish, along with the traffic that came with it.

Google’s site move documentation says to map every old URL to its new home before you switch, and to use permanent server-side redirects such as 301 or 308. It advises keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least a year, so signals can pass to the new addresses. Changing domain too? Search Console has a Change of Address tool for the old site. Even when you get all that right, Google notes your visibility in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move, and suggests businesses with seasonal traffic move during one of their regular dips. So don’t launch in your busiest month if you can help it. A garden design firm going live in March is asking for trouble. So is a retailer in November.

Before launch, pull a list of old URLs from your sitemap, your analytics and your content management system. Pay most attention to the pages that bring in visits and enquiries, and make sure each one lands somewhere sensible. After launch, keep a close eye on Search Console and your key events for the first few weeks.

When you are ready to start

If you’ve worked through all that, you’ve already got most of what a decent web designer needs to give you an accurate proposal. We offer website design and development for businesses. Want to talk your plans through, or get a second opinion on a brief or quote you’ve already had? Get in touch with us. We’ll tell you whether a new business website build makes sense or whether a smaller set of changes would do the job.