How to Prepare for a Website Development Project
Ask any web developer in Lagos which stage of a project takes longest and the answer is rarely "development". It is the eleven days waiting for the About page text, the fortnight spent recovering a domain from a former designer, and the three rounds of review that happen because nobody agreed who approves.
Preparation is the cheapest part of a website project and it produces the largest return. This guide sets out exactly what to have ready, in what order, and how to tell whether you are actually ready to start.
Are you ready? A readiness score
Score one point for each statement that is true today.
- We know which business outcomes the site must produce.
- We have written or commissioned the text for every planned page.
- We hold the login for our domain registrar.
- We hold the login for our hosting and business email.
- We have professional photographs of our premises, team or products.
- One named person can approve design and content decisions.
- We have agreed who reviews and how many review rounds are reasonable.
- Our budget covers the build plus hosting and maintenance for twelve months.
- We know which third-party accounts are needed and who will open them.
- Two people can give three to five hours a week to the project.
8–10 points: Start now. Invite quotations and expect a smooth build.
5–7 points: Spend two to four weeks closing the gaps first. Starting now will cost you more than waiting.
Below 5: You are not ready. Beginning a build in this state produces a half-finished site, a frustrated vendor and an unpaid final invoice.
The score is deliberately weighted towards things only you can provide. A developer can build; a developer cannot write your service descriptions or recover your domain.
Preparation 1: Get control of your domain, hosting and email
This is the single most common cause of delay in Nigerian website projects, and it is entirely avoidable.
Establish, in writing, the answers to these questions:
- Which registrar holds the domain, and whose email address is on the account?
- When does the domain expire?
- Where is the current site hosted, and who pays for it?
- Where is business email hosted, and is it tied to the same hosting?
- Does anyone outside the business hold administrative access?
If the answer to any of these is "our former developer", start recovery now, before you engage anyone. Recovery can take days or weeks, particularly if the individual is unresponsive or the account uses their personal email.
Practical steps:
- Create a company email address such as it@yourbusiness.com.ng for all technology accounts, never a personal Gmail.
- Transfer domain ownership into an account controlled by the business. .ng domains are administered through NiRA-accredited registrars.
- Record registrar, hosting and email credentials in a password manager the business controls.
- Diarise renewal dates. An expired domain during a rebuild is an avoidable emergency.
If business email currently runs on the same hosting as the website, tell your developer before migration planning starts. Losing email during a website move is a serious and common accident.
Preparation 2: Decide who decides
Agree three roles before kickoff.
| Role | Responsibility | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Decision-maker | Final approval on design, content and scope changes | Exactly one |
| Coordinator | Gathers content, schedules reviews, chases internal contributors | One |
| Reviewers | Give feedback within an agreed window | Two or three at most |
Write down two rules alongside them. First, feedback is consolidated by the coordinator and sent once per round, not sent piecemeal by four people. Second, reviews are returned within a stated number of working days, usually three to five.
A website project with five equal decision-makers takes roughly twice as long as one with a single accountable owner, and the result is usually worse, because design by committee produces compromise.
Preparation 3: Gather and write the content
Content is where most projects stall, so treat it as the main preparation task rather than an afterthought.
Build a simple content plan:
| Page | Who writes it | Source material | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Coordinator with vendor's editing | Company profile document | Week 1 |
| About | Managing director | Existing profile, CAC details | Week 1 |
| Service page 1 to 4 | Head of each service line | Existing proposals | Week 2 |
| Pricing or process | Sales lead | Standard quotation template | Week 2 |
| Work examples | Coordinator | Project photographs, permissions | Week 3 |
| Contact | Coordinator | Address, landmark, phone, hours | Week 1 |
| Privacy notice and terms | Vendor drafts, adviser reviews | Existing policies if any | Week 4 |
Three practical rules:
- Start from what exists. Company profiles, proposals, brochures and WhatsApp replies to frequent questions are raw material. Editing existing text is far faster than writing from nothing.
- Answer real questions. The questions customers ask before buying should each have a paragraph somewhere on the site.
- Decide about copywriting early. If nobody internally will write, ask vendors to quote for it during the proposal stage. Discovering in week three that nobody will write the content is the classic route to a six-month project.
Preparation 4: Sort out photographs and brand assets
Nigerian buyers are alert to signals of authenticity. Real photographs of your premises, your team and your work do more for trust than any design treatment.
Gather before kickoff:
- Logo in a vector format such as SVG, AI or EPS, not only a JPEG pulled from an old flyer.
- Brand colours and fonts, if they exist. If not, say so and let the vendor propose.
- Photographs of premises, exterior and interior, including signage.
- Team photographs on a consistent background.
- Product or project photographs, well lit, high resolution.
- Any certificates, registrations or memberships you may display, and confirmation that you may display them.
If you need a photography session, book it during preparation week one. Photography is the asset most likely to slip, because it requires everyone to be present and presentable on the same day.
Avoid filling the site with stock imagery of offices that are clearly not yours. Customers notice, and so do search engines, in the sense that generic pages rarely earn attention.
Preparation 5: Open the accounts the site will depend on
Depending on your site, some of these need to exist before development can be completed:
- Payment gateway. Providers such as Paystack or Flutterwave require business verification with CAC documents and bank details. Start early; verification is not instant.
- Business bank account in the company's name, matching your CAC registration.
- Google Business Profile, claimed and verified, so your site details and listing details match.
- Google Analytics and Search Console, created under a company email.
- WhatsApp Business. Decide between the WhatsApp Business App and Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform if you need automation.
- Email marketing account, if the site will collect subscribers.
- Delivery partner accounts, if you sell physical goods.
Register every one of these in the company's name, using the company email created in preparation one. Accounts opened in a staff member's personal name become a problem the day that person leaves.
Preparation 6: Approve a budget that includes year one running costs
Approve the total first-year commitment, not only the build price.
Indicative 2026 ranges for Nigerian businesses; actual quotes vary with scope, vendor and exchange rate. Compare two or three [written quotations](/pricing/) on identical scope.
| Cost item | Indicative range | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Basic business website, five to eight pages | ₦150,000–₦500,000 | One-off |
| Professional custom-designed website | ₦500,000–₦2,500,000 | One-off |
| E-commerce website | ₦400,000–₦3,500,000+ | One-off |
| Copywriting, if outsourced | Quoted per page | One-off |
| Photography session | Quoted locally | One-off |
| Domain | ₦3,000–₦30,000 | Per year |
| Shared hosting | ₦20,000–₦120,000 | Per year |
| SSL certificate | Often included in hosting | Per year |
| Maintenance and support | ₦20,000–₦150,000 | Per month |
| Payment gateway fees | Percentage per transaction | Ongoing |
Two planning points. First, hold back roughly 10% of the build budget for post-launch adjustments; there are always a few. Second, agree the maintenance arrangement before launch rather than after, when you have less leverage and more urgency.
Preparation 7: Protect the time your team must give
A typical five-to-eight page business website needs three to five hours a week from your side during the build, concentrated in content weeks and review weeks. A larger custom site or an e-commerce build needs more, particularly for product data.
Do three things:
- Put the review sessions in the calendar before kickoff, for the whole project.
- Agree an internal turnaround commitment, for example feedback within three working days.
- Avoid starting during your busiest trading period. A retailer beginning a build in November will not give it attention, and the project will drift into the new year.
A four-week preparation plan
Week 1: access and ownership. Create the company technology email. Recover or confirm domain, hosting and email control. List all existing accounts. Name the decision-maker and coordinator.
Week 2: content and assets. Assign every page to a writer with a due date. Book photography. Collect the logo in vector form. Gather registration details and any permissions needed to display client work.
Week 3: brief and quotations. Write the project brief, send it to three to five vendors on the same day, and schedule clarification calls. Meanwhile, keep writing content.
Week 4: decisions and accounts. Compare proposals on one sheet. Open payment gateway, analytics and profile accounts. Approve the first-year budget. Agree the review schedule and confirm the start date.
At the end of week four you can start a build with content mostly written, access secured, accounts opened and a decision structure in place. That is a genuinely different project from one that starts with a deposit and an idea.
Example (hypothetical): a furniture manufacturer in Lagos
Example (hypothetical). A furniture manufacturer in Ikorodu sells to homeowners and to corporate clients fitting out offices. It has an Instagram following, a domain registered by a cousin in 2019, and no current website.
Preparation surfaces three problems before any vendor is engaged. The domain is registered to a personal email nobody can access, and the renewal is due in seven weeks. There are hundreds of product photographs, all shot on phones in poor light, unsuitable for a corporate audience. And two directors both expect to approve everything.
The preparation month is spent recovering the domain through the registrar's process, booking a one-day photography session covering fifteen flagship pieces and the workshop, and agreeing that one director owns decisions while the other is consulted on pricing pages only.
Content is drafted by editing the existing corporate proposal into four service pages: bespoke office furniture, home furniture, contract fit-out and repairs. The company opens a payment gateway account for deposits, which takes ten days to verify.
When the build starts, the vendor receives written content, professional photographs, working domain access and one named approver. The build runs to schedule, not because the developer is exceptional, but because nothing is waiting on the client.
What changes for Nigerian businesses
Domain custody is a real risk. A significant share of small Nigerian businesses do not control their own domain. Resolve this before spending money on a rebuild, or you may pay for a site you cannot point at your address.
Email and hosting are often entangled. Many small businesses run email on shared hosting. Any migration must plan for email continuity, and you should know your mail configuration before the move.
Photography quality is a differentiator. Professional photography is affordable relative to a website build in most Nigerian cities and lifts perceived quality more than extra design revisions.
Payment verification takes time. Gateway onboarding requires CAC documents, bank verification and sometimes additional checks. Start it in preparation, not during launch week.
Connectivity during reviews. Schedule review calls when your team has reliable internet and power. Reviewing a site over a struggling connection produces feedback about speed rather than substance.
Addresses and landmarks. Prepare your contact details the way customers navigate: street address plus a recognisable landmark, plus the phone number that is actually answered.
Data protection preparation. If the site will collect enquiries, subscriptions or orders, prepare for consent wording, a privacy notice and a retention position under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. Confirm your obligations with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission or a qualified adviser.
Mistakes to avoid
- Paying a deposit before content exists. The project starts, then waits for you, and momentum is lost on both sides.
- Leaving domain recovery until migration week. It becomes an emergency at the worst possible moment.
- Appointing a committee. Multiple equal approvers double timelines and dilute the result.
- Using personal accounts for business technology. Every account should belong to the company.
- Budgeting only the build. Hosting, maintenance and gateway fees are ongoing and predictable; plan for them.
- Skipping professional photographs. It is the cheapest visible quality upgrade available to most Nigerian businesses.
- Starting during peak trading. Attention is a project resource and yours will be elsewhere.
- Assuming copywriting is included. Ask, in writing, before signing.
Pre-kickoff checklist
- Company technology email created and controlled by the business
- Domain ownership confirmed and renewal date diarised
- Hosting and business email access held internally
- Decision-maker, coordinator and reviewers named
- Review turnaround commitment agreed in working days
- Content assigned page by page with due dates
- Copywriting responsibility settled, in writing
- Photography booked or completed
- Logo available in a vector format
- Payment gateway account opened and verified, if needed
- Google Business Profile, Analytics and Search Console created
- First-year budget approved, including hosting and maintenance
- Review sessions scheduled for the whole project
- Launch date chosen outside peak trading
- Privacy notice responsibility assigned
Conclusion
Website projects in Nigeria rarely fail because the development is hard. They fail because content was never written, the domain was never recovered, nobody had authority to approve, and the budget stopped at launch. Every one of those is a preparation problem with a preparation solution.
Spend four weeks before kickoff securing your accounts, naming your decision-maker, writing your content, booking photography, opening third-party accounts and approving a first-year budget. Score yourself honestly against the readiness list and close the gaps. The build that follows will be faster, cheaper in real terms and far less frustrating for everyone.
If you would like a pre-project review of your readiness, your content plan and the ownership of your domain and hosting before you commit to a build, Linestech can work through it with you and help you start from a stronger position.
Frequently asked questions
How long should preparation take before a website build starts?
Two to four weeks for most Nigerian SMEs. Less if you already control your domain and have current content and photographs. Longer if a domain must be recovered from a former developer or if photography is needed. Preparation happens in parallel with inviting quotations, so it rarely delays the overall timeline.
Can we start the build while still writing content?
Partially. Design and structure can begin from a sitemap and draft content, and good vendors will use placeholder text for early layouts. But approval and launch will wait for real content, so agree a firm date for final text. Projects that begin with no content at all are the ones that stretch to six months.
What if we do not have a logo or brand guidelines?
Say so in the brief and ask vendors to quote for basic brand work, or engage a designer separately before the build. A website built around an inconsistent or low-resolution logo will look amateur regardless of the development quality, so resolve it during preparation.
Who should own the domain and hosting accounts?
The business, in an account created with a company email address, with billing in the company's name. Your developer may manage them day to day, but ownership and administrative access must remain yours. This is the single most important preparation step for long-term control.
Do we need the payment gateway before the site is built?
You need it before launch, and applying early is wise because verification with CAC documents and bank details takes time. Development can proceed using the provider's test environment, but do not leave the application until the week you intend to go live.
How much staff time will the project really take?
Plan for three to five hours a week from the coordinator and one to two hours a week from the decision-maker on a standard business site, with heavier weeks during content preparation and review. E-commerce projects need substantially more time because of product data, images and delivery rules.
Should we prepare a website brief as well?
Yes. Preparation and the brief are complementary: preparation makes you ready to build, the brief makes quotations comparable. Write the brief in week three of preparation, once you know your content plan, budget band and decision structure, then issue it to several vendors at once.
What if our current website is still live during the rebuild?
Keep it live. A new site is normally built on a temporary address and switched over at launch, with redirects from old page addresses to new ones so existing search visibility is not lost. Confirm in writing that the vendor will map and implement those redirects.
Sources and further reading
Figures, platform rules and regulations change. These are the primary references behind this article and the places to check before you act on it.
