GUIDE
How does a website project actually run?
From the first conversation to launch. The steps a website project goes through, what is decided along the way and what is expected from you as the client.
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Written by Erdem G. · İZVELA
Commissioning a website is less like placing an order and more like running a short project together. The business explains itself, the studio turns that into a structure, and content and technical work are built on top. This guide walks through the process from the point of view of someone doing it for the first time.
What are the stages?
A serious project moves through roughly five stages. Discovery (your work, your customers, your competitors), structure and design decisions (which pages, what it should feel like), content production (words and images), build and testing, then launch. Your approval closes each stage. Nothing moves forward while something you dislike is still on the table.
What stretches a timeline most is content. Projects where the text is left to the client can sit idle for weeks. When the studio writes the copy and brings it for approval, that wait disappears.
What is expected from you?
Three things. Explain your business, share whatever real material you have (logo, photographs, documents), and answer when a decision is needed. If you have no photographs, a shoot can be planned. If you have no logo, identity work comes first. Invented content and a pile of stock images are the last thing you should want, because they cost you trust.
What happens after handover?
Handover is not the end of the relationship. You should receive a guide explaining how to update the site, and you should know exactly who holds the domain and hosting access. The domain being registered in your own name matters most. Even if you change agencies later, the address stays yours.
Launch day is a task of its own. Without search console registration, sitemap submission and matching the site to your Google Business profile, a new site can stay invisible for weeks.
Which decisions are yours?
Four of them, and they shape everything else. What the site is for, which pages it needs, who writes the text, and when it goes live. An agency can advise on all four, but the answers belong to the business. A project where these are left open drifts, because every later question reopens one of them.
The one people underestimate is the second. A site is not a brochure with a fixed page count. Pages exist because someone searches for what is on them, so the page list follows from what your customers actually look for.
Who writes the content?
This is the single biggest reason projects run late. When the text is left to the business, it waits for a quiet week that never comes. When the agency writes it and sends it for approval, the waiting disappears and your job becomes reviewing rather than producing.
Either way the facts come from you. Nobody outside the business knows what you actually do, which jobs pay best, or what customers keep asking. What an agency adds is turning that into pages people find and read.
What happens in the first week after launch?
Three things, and none of them are cosmetic. The site is submitted to search engines so it can be indexed. Analytics and search tooling are connected so you can see what people search for. And the pages are checked on real phones, because a layout that behaves on a desktop can still break on a small screen.
Being live and being findable are not the same thing. Indexing takes days, and settling into position for your own brand name takes weeks. Anyone promising a ranking within the first week is describing something that does not happen.
Be realistic about timing. On our own sites, new pages took 3 days to 2 weeks to enter the Google index, and results for the brand name settled in 4 to 8 weeks. Use the first week to finish the Search Console registration, the sitemap submission and the Google Business match instead of waiting for rankings.
How long does a website take?
It depends on scope. A few-page introduction site and a multilingual corporate project do not share a timeline. Whatever the answer is, it should be given up front once scope is clear. Be wary of any process that answers with "we will let you know when it is ready".
What is the difference between a template and a custom design?
A template is a ready-made shell used on thousands of sites. It is fast, but it does not describe your business and you end up looking like your competitors. A custom design is built around your work. Page structure, visual language and content follow your customer. The difference shows up less in the price than in how often the site turns into actual work.