We get asked so often ‘How long does a website take to build?’ and people often underestimate (a) how long a website takes to build and (b), how involved the process is.
So often we hear from our web clients, ‘There’s a lot to it, isn’t there?’. The Go Daddy and Wix adverts can be a bit misleading, to say the least!
A new website is also a perfect opportunity to reflect on your business; what you do; what you do well; what makes you stand out; and how you solve your customers’ problems.
The answers to these questions form the key messaging and content of your website. Getting to the heart of this can take and affect the question ‘How long does a website take to build?’ but we find that it is time extremely well-spent and makes such a difference to the user journey too.
In all honesty, the reason it can take longer to build a website is waiting for the client to come back with feedback, images and content (sorry, we don’t mean to offend!!) but that is why we include copywriting and project management to remove as many of these obstacles as possible.
If everything keeps moving, we always say 6-8 weeks is very doable (and this time can be shorter on smaller websites too, obviously the size of the website has a big bearing on the answer to the question ‘How long does it take to build a website?).
More complex websites, like e-commerce, members areas, booking systems etc do take longer and we would probably say allow at least 10-12 weeks of build time (invariably we find this spills over even with the best of intentions, there’s just so much to do).
As with anything, how long it takes to build a website depends on the project and the deadline. We can, and you can get websites built in a couple of weeks if you have all the information and content etc but we do think it is important to be realistic about web design and for the norm, we would say aim for 3 months from start to finish, and if it’s done before then that is a bonus!
