Featured · client work
Lunarlink Solutions, Toronto
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A small business website usually takes four to ten weeks from kickoff to launch. The build itself is rarely what sets the date. Content, photography, and how quickly one decision-maker returns feedback account for most of the variation, which is why two projects of identical scope can finish a month apart.
Design and build are the visible parts and the smaller half of the calendar. Most of the elapsed time on a small project is spent waiting: for the copy to be approved, for a photo shoot, for someone to find the login to the domain registrar.
A studio can compress its own stages. It cannot compress the owner's, which is why a realistic schedule names what the business has to deliver and by when, rather than listing only the studio's milestones.
Content written from scratch, when the existing site has nothing worth keeping. Photography, which needs a shoot day, a tidy job site, and in most trades a weather window. And approval by committee, where four people comment separately over three weeks instead of once together.
Integrations are the fourth and the least predictable. A booking system, a payment processor, or a handoff into a CRM each depend on an account somebody else controls and a support queue nobody controls.
A hard date is fine when it is known at kickoff. A trade show, a rebrand, or a seasonal window such as a furnace page that has to be live before October are all workable, because scope gets cut deliberately at the start.
A date introduced halfway through gets paid for somewhere less visible. The things that go first are accessibility, page speed, the pages below the top level, and the schema and internal linking that decide whether the site is found at all. None of that is obvious at launch, and all of it is more expensive to add afterwards.
Who writes the copy, and what happens to the schedule if the business does not deliver it. How many rounds of feedback are included, and what counts as a round. What the studio's own turnaround is on a comment, which is the number most proposals leave out.
And what specifically has to exist before work starts. A project that begins without domain access, a logo file that scales, or a decision about who signs off tends to arrive at the same delay in week six regardless of how it was scheduled.
| Stage | Typical length | What holds it up |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and structure | 1 to 2 weeks | Getting the decision-maker in one room and settling what the site is for |
| Copy and content | 1 to 3 weeks, running in parallel | Whether the business supplies it or the studio writes it |
| Design | 1 to 2 weeks | Feedback arriving one comment at a time instead of in one pass |
| Build and content entry | 2 to 3 weeks | Photography, integrations, and anything needing a third-party account |
| Testing and launch | 3 to 5 days | DNS access, and finding out who actually controls the domain |
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