What Information a Web Designer Needs From You to Get Started
The single biggest cause of a stalled website build isn't design disagreement or scope creep. It's a client folder that shows up half empty. Every day a designer waits on your logo file, your service list, or your login for the old domain registrar, the launch date slides. The good news: the information needed for a website design project is finite, knowable, and most of it already exists somewhere in your phone, your inbox, or your head.
Below is what we ask for at the start of a build, ranked by how badly a project stalls when it's missing. Work top to bottom and you'll be more prepared than most small business owners who hire a designer.
Inconsistent contact details damage local search rankings
Start with the boring stuff, because it shows up on every single page. Legal business name, the name you go by day to day, phone number, email address, physical address or service area, hours, and the social profiles you still use. Write it once, in a single document, exactly as you want it displayed.
Why this ranks first: inconsistent contact details do real damage to local search. If your address reads "Suite 2" on the site, "Ste. 2" on Google Business Profile, and "#2" on your Facebook page, you've handed search engines three versions of one business. A designer can't standardize what you never supplied.
Service area, spelled out by town or radius, not just "Central Maine"
Whether you want your phone number clickable on mobile (yes, always) and which number rings where
Which email address should receive form submissions, and who else gets copied
Any hours that change seasonally, plus how you want closures handled
If you're a home service business, pay extra attention here. Buried or mismatched contact info is one of the recurring problems on trade and home service sites, and it's entirely preventable at intake.
Vague service descriptions give designers nothing to work with
Give your designer a plain list of every service or product, what's included in each, who it's for, and what it costs (or the range, or "quote only"). Bullet points beat polished paragraphs here. A rough list in your voice gives a copywriter something real to shape. A vague "we do everything construction" gives them nothing.
Pricing is the piece owners hold back most often, and it's usually a mistake. Visitors who can't find any cost signal tend to leave and price-shop elsewhere. Even a starting-at number or a three-tier structure keeps them on the page. We publish our own pricing for the same reason: our managed website plan is listed plainly because it removes a step from the buyer's decision.
Include what you don't do, too. Jobs you turn down, geographic limits, minimum order sizes. Those filters save you unqualified calls later, and they belong on the site.
Vector logo files prevent costly rebuilds at launch
Send the highest-quality logo you own. Vector files (.vg, .ai, .eps) are best because they scale to any size without blurring. A transparent .png at large dimensions is workable. A logo screenshot pulled off your old website is not, and we'll usually have to rebuild or redraw it, which costs time nobody budgeted.
Alongside the logo, dig up your color hex codes and font names if a designer built your brand previously. Don't have any of that? Say so. It's a normal starting point, and part of a build is establishing those choices. What slows things down is a half answer: "I think the blue is kind of navy?" Either supply the code or hand the decision over cleanly.
| Asset | Ideal format | Workable | Causes delays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logo | Vector .svg or .ai | Large transparent .png | Screenshot or low-res .jpg |
| Photos | Original camera or phone files | Full-size exports | Images pulled from social media |
| Colors | Hex codes | A brand guide PDF | "Something like the sign out front" |
| Copy | Plain text doc | Bulleted notes | Text trapped inside a PDF or image |
Real photos build trust faster than stock imagery
Stock photography reads as stock photography, and visitors know it instantly. Real photos of your crew, your shop, your finished jobs, and your products do more for trust than any design flourish we can add. Send originals from the camera or phone, not versions downloaded back off Instagram, which compresses them into mush.
Organize as you send. A folder named "kitchen remodel, Waterville, before" is worth ten minutes of your time and saves an hour of guessing on our end. Note anything with a permission issue too: a client's home, a recognizable face, a job site you're not cleared to publish.
If your photo library is truly thin, say it early. There are ways to design around limited imagery, but they change the layout approach, and that's a decision made at the start, not patched in week three.
Missing domain logins stop launches cold
This is the quiet project-killer. Your domain lives with a registrar, your current site may live somewhere else, and your email might be tied to either one. If nobody can find the login, launch day stops cold while you reset passwords on an account registered to an old employee's address.
Track down, before the build starts:
Which company your domain is registered with, and the account login
Where the current website is hosted, if that's separate
Who controls your business email and what it runs on
Access to Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, and Search Console if they exist
The last one matters more than people assume. Handing over existing analytics access lets a designer see which of your current pages already pull traffic, so those URLs get preserved or redirected instead of vaporized. Losing them is one of the more expensive SEO mistakes a new business website makes, and it's avoidable with one shared login.
One primary action shapes every design decision
Tell your designer what the site needs to do. Book appointments? Generate quote requests? Sell twelve products? Get people to call? Pick the primary action, then name the secondary one. Everything from button placement to form length follows from that answer.
Then sketch the page list. Most small business sites run lean, and there's a reasonable baseline of pages a service business needs before you start adding more. If you want individual pages per service or per town, flag it now, because that decision reshapes the navigation and the SEO plan.
A designer can build almost anything. What they can't do is guess which single action matters most to your revenue.
Three real website examples beat abstract design language
Send links, not adjectives. "Clean and modern" means about nine different things depending on who's saying it. Three real URLs with a sentence each ("I like how fast the booking button is," "the photos here feel like ours," "this navigation is simpler than mine") converts taste into direction.
Include a couple you dislike, too. Negative examples are often sharper than positive ones, and they prevent an entire round of revisions spent discovering you hate full-screen video headers.
Your references don't need to be in your industry. Sometimes a restaurant's menu layout is exactly the right model for a contractor's service list. We'd rather see what truly appeals to you than a competitor's site you feel obligated to reference.
Undisclosed integrations surface problems after design begins
List everything the website has to connect to or account for. Scheduling software, a payment processor, an email marketing platform, a CRM, a booking widget your industry association requires, a shipping carrier. Squarespace handles most common tools natively or through built-in connections, but the ones that need workarounds are worth surfacing before design begins rather than after.
Appointment scheduling and which calendar it syncs to
Payment processing, including whether you take deposits
Email list provider and where signup forms should feed
Licensing numbers, insurance details, or disclosures your industry requires on-page
Accessibility obligations if you contract with public entities
E-commerce raises the stakes on this item considerably. Product counts, variants, weights, tax settings, and shipping rules all need answers before a store can be built, which is why an online store build starts with a longer intake than a standard service site.
Approval delays cost more time than budget constraints
Three logistics questions, and they belong in the first conversation. When do you need to be live, and is that date tied to something real (a season, a grand opening, a trade show) or is it a preference? What have you set aside for this, both upfront and monthly? And who has final approval?
That last one causes more delay than budget ever does. When a build needs sign-off from a business partner who wasn't in the kickoff call, revisions loop. Name the decision-maker at the start and bring them into the early conversations, not the final review.
On budget: naming a range isn't showing your hand, it's saving both parties a mismatched proposal. A build with a fixed launch date and a modest budget points toward a managed monthly package. A build with unusual functionality and a flexible date points toward a custom project. The tradeoffs between those two paths come down to what your site really has to do, and a realistic budget range makes that conversation fast instead of awkward.
Knowing what works tells designers what to preserve
Last item, and it's the one most intake forms skip. If you have a current site, tell your designer which pages get phone calls, which blog post people mention, which headline you wrote that customers quote back to you. Also tell them what frustrates you: the form that stopped sending, the page you can never find in the editor, the thing customers always ask because the site doesn't answer it.
Rebuilds fail when the new site is prettier and performs worse. That happens when nobody documented what the old one was doing right. Five minutes of "here's what I'd keep" protects the parts of your site already earning their keep, and it's why deciding between a refresh and a full rebuild should happen with data in hand, not just a gut reaction to an outdated design.
Spread information gathering across a week, not one sitting
Don't try to assemble the information needed for a website design project in one sitting. Make a single folder in your cloud drive, name it after the project, and drop things in as you find them over a week. Logo goes in Monday. Photos Tuesday night. Domain login when you finally locate the old email.
A reasonable order of operations: contact details and service list first, since those unblock copywriting. Logins second, since those tend to take the longest to track down. Photos and reference sites last, since design can start on structure while imagery gets sorted. Getting items one through five over to your designer is usually enough to break ground, and a good launch timeline is built around that staggered handoff rather than requiring everything at once.
One caveat worth stating plainly: a designer worth hiring will pull a lot of this out of you in a kickoff call rather than dumping a 40-field form on your desk. But the parts only you can supply, especially logins, pricing, and photos, still have to come from your side. No amount of good process replaces them.
Frequently asked questions
What information is needed for a website design project if I'm starting from scratch?
The information needed for a website design project includes, at minimum: your business name and contact details, a list of what you sell with pricing, any logo file you have, photos of your work, and a clear answer about what you want visitors to do. A brand-new business with no logo, no photos, and no existing site can still start a build. You just need to say so upfront so the scope includes creating those pieces rather than assuming they exist.
What if I don't have professional photos?
Phone photos taken in good light usually work better than stock imagery. Shoot outdoors or near a window, hold the phone steady, take more than you think you need, and send the originals rather than compressed versions. If your industry depends heavily on visuals, budget for a short photo session before the build starts, since replacing images after launch means reworking layouts.
Do I need to write my own website copy?
No, but you need to supply the raw material: what you do, who it's for, what makes your approach different, and how you'd explain it to a customer standing in front of you. Rough notes are fine. Our packages include copywriting, and writing site copy that sounds like your business depends far more on the details you provide than on polished prose you hand over.
What happens if I can't find my domain login?
It's recoverable, but start looking now rather than on launch week. Check your email for renewal receipts from the registrar, which usually identify the company and the account email. If the domain was registered by a former employee or a previous web company, most registrars have a documented recovery process requiring proof of business ownership. That process takes days, sometimes longer.
How much does missing information really delay a project?
It varies by what's missing. A late logo file might cost a day. An unlocatable domain registrar can hold up a launch for a week or more, since transfers and DNS changes have their own waiting periods. The items on this list are ordered roughly by delay risk for exactly that reason.
Start with logo, services list, and domain registrar name
Open a new folder right now and drop in three things: your logo file, a list of your services with prices, and the name of the company your domain is registered with. That's the hardest 20% of the information needed for a website design project, and once it exists in one place, the rest tends to follow quickly. When you're ready to hand it over, tell us about your project and we'll walk through what's still missing.
