“How long does it take?” usually gets answered with a single number, and that number normally describes the build alone, not the time spent getting ready to build.
The honest version: TruePoint plans around roughly a week of build work once the agreed inputs are ready. Total elapsed time depends on when the required copy, photos, business details and approvals are in place, and that part is mostly determined by you.
That’s not a complaint. It’s useful, because it’s the part you can control.
What happens, in order
Scoping. A conversation about the business, who the site is for, and what it needs to do. This settles what’s being built and what it costs, before anyone starts. It takes as long as the replies take.
Gathering. Content, photos, business details, service descriptions, pricing. This stage is almost entirely on your side, and its length is the main reason two similar projects can finish weeks apart.
Building. Design and construction. About a week for a typical small business site once everything’s in hand.
Review. You look at it on a real device, note what’s wrong, changes get made. A few days including your turnaround time.
Launch. Domain pointed at the finished site, everything checked live. Same day, with one caveat below.
How much of that applies depends on how big the site is — how many pages you actually need is the question that sets the scale. TruePoint’s own sequence is shorter than this: scope and price are published, so the first stage is choosing one rather than settling it in a call.
What you’ll need to supply
Have these ready and the project moves at the speed of the build. Gather them as you go and the timeline stretches.
- Business details — legal name, service area, phone, email, hours if relevant
- Services — what you offer, described the way you’d describe it to a customer
- Pricing — if you’re publishing it, the actual numbers
- Photos — of your work, your team, your premises
- Anything existing — logo files, current site content, brochures worth reusing
- Domain access — or the willingness to register one, in your own name
The one worth settling before anything else: a clear sense of what the site is supposed to do. Not the design — the job. Bring in estimate requests? Stop repetitive phone calls? Look credible enough to charge more? A business that knows this moves fast, because most decisions answer themselves against it. A business still deciding pays for the deciding, in time and usually in money.
Content and photos: where final page work can stall
Photos are a required input. When they aren’t ready, the final page work can’t be finished — so it’s worth being specific about what makes them usable.
Photos taken quickly on a phone, in poor light, or cropped for social media aren’t automatically unusable — but they need cropping, resizing, and color correction to sit properly in a layout, and some can’t be rescued.
If you’re taking new ones, a few things make a disproportionate difference:
- Shoot wide and landscape. Website layouts crop horizontally. A tightly-framed vertical phone photo can’t become a wide hero image, but a wide shot can always be cropped down.
- Use daylight. Near a window, or outdoors on an overcast day. Overhead indoor lighting is a frequent culprit when good work photographs badly — color casts, hard shadows, dim corners.
- Get the whole thing in frame. Detail shots are useful as secondary images, but a finished room, a finished job, or a full storefront is what people want to see first.
- Before and after, from the same spot. For any trade or renovation work, this is some of the most persuasive material you can supply, and it costs nothing but remembering to take the “before.”
- More than you think you need. The more usable photos there are, the more freely the layout can use them; a short supply means the design has to work around the shortage.
Stock photography is a workable fallback, but for a service or trade business a photo of your actual work is stronger proof than generic stock.
The launch-day caveat
When the domain gets pointed at the new site, the change has to propagate across the internet’s DNS system. Usually this is quick — minutes to a couple of hours. Occasionally it takes up to a day, and during that window some people see the new site and some see the old one.
Nothing is broken when this happens. It’s worth knowing in advance so it isn’t alarming, and it’s worth not scheduling an announcement for the same hour as the switch.
What happens after
Defects — anything in the agreed scope not working correctly — should be fixed by whoever built it, free, for a defined window. Ask what that window is before you hire; it’s one of the questions worth putting to any web designer.
Changes — new pages, new content, design adjustments — are new work and get quoted as such. That’s reasonable at any point; what matters is that it’s clear which category something falls into.
Maintenance depends entirely on what the site is built on. A platform with a database, CMS, and plugins genuinely requires ongoing updates. A static site has far less of that, which is why some builders require a maintenance plan and others don’t. See flat fee, hourly, or retainer for how that shapes pricing.
What actually slows projects down
Four things that stretch a timeline:
- Waiting on content and photos. Final page work can’t be completed until the required copy and images are in hand.
- Unclear decision-making. Especially when more than one person has opinions and nobody has final say. Decide who signs off before you start.
- Scope discovered late. “Can it also do bookings?” in week two is a different project than it was in week one. Not unreasonable — just decide early where you can.
- Slow review cycles. The build finishes in days and then waits two weeks for feedback. Block out time for review when the project starts.
Notice that none of these are the builder working slowly. That can happen too — which is why the build window, and what it depends on, is worth agreeing up front.
Where TruePoint sits
We plan around roughly a week of build work from the point the agreed inputs are in hand — content, photos, business details, and approvals where needed. The clock starts when the project is genuinely ready to build rather than at first contact, because otherwise the timeline is measuring the gathering rather than the building.
Payment is in full before work begins. There’s no deposit-and-balance arrangement and no payment plan. Your project starts when the payment clears; the build starts when your completed project form arrives. Both are worth knowing at the outset — a payment schedule you only discover at launch is the kind of surprise a flat fee is supposed to remove.
We’ll tell you exactly what’s needed up front, in a list, so nothing surfaces halfway through.
Defects in the agreed scope are fixed free for 30 days after launch. Changes after that are quoted per job, with no retainer required — a static site has no plugin-and-database update cycle to bill monthly against, so nothing about keeping your site online depends on an ongoing plan. If you’d rather hold standing capacity than get per-job quotes, Website Care is optional and separate.
If you want to know what a project like yours costs before getting into logistics, what a small business website actually costs covers the ranges. If you’re ready to start, the project form is the next step.