You have paid the deposit and the project has started. Most clients expect to see a design in the first few days. That is not what happens, and the reason is the most useful thing we can tell you before we begin.

Week one is discovery and planning. No design. Here is what actually takes place, why each part exists, and what we need from you while it does.

Day one: the questionnaire, not a meeting

We do not open with a two-hour discovery call. Most of our clients run their own business, answer their own WhatsApp and do not have two uninterrupted hours in a working day.

Instead you get a structured questionnaire, organised in five sections: your business, your website, functionality, content and timeline. You fill it in when you have a moment, in Spanish or English, and you can answer in fragments.

It asks what you sell and to whom, which of your services actually makes money, who your customers are and what language they search in, what you want the site to do, what you already have, and what date you are building toward.

The reason this is a document rather than a conversation is that written answers can be re-read in week three when a decision depends on them. A phone call cannot.

Days one to two: what we do while you fill it in

We do not wait. In parallel we look at where you stand right now.

We search for your business the way a customer would, on a phone, in both languages — on a phone because that is what your customers have. The Oficina Nacional de Estadística's ENHOGAR-MICS 2025 survey found 89.4% of Dominican households own a smartphone against 32.3% owning any computer, laptop or tablet. We look at your Google Business Profile and whether its website link resolves. We look at whatever site you have, if you have one, and measure how long it takes to appear on a mid-range phone.

That last check matters because of what the market looks like. We measured 36 Punta Cana and Bayahibe hotel websites and found a median of 17.1 seconds for the main content to load, with exactly one site in 36 coming in under four seconds. The full study is here.

We also look at four or five competitors in your category — not to copy them, but to see what a customer comparing you against them currently sees.

Days two to three: the structure argument

This is the part clients find most surprising and, afterwards, most valuable.

Before anything is designed, we agree what pages exist and what each one is for. Not "Home, About, Services, Contact" by default. Which services get their own page because people search for them separately. Whether your prices go on the page. Whether the Spanish and English versions are the same pages or different ones, because sometimes the two audiences want genuinely different things. Spanish and English are both included in the base price; two further languages are $200.

We will push back here. If you ask for an eight-page site and your business has one service that brings in most of the revenue, we will say so. If you want a blog, we will ask who is going to write the second post.

This is also where we decide whether you need a website at all or whether a one-page site does the job. Saying that costs us money and we would rather say it in week one than build the wrong thing.

Days three to four: the content inventory

We go through what you have and what has to be created.

Photographs, and whether they are usable — an uncropped 6,000-pixel image from a photographer is usable, a screenshot of a flyer is not. Service descriptions. Prices, or a decision not to publish them. Your opening hours and the address you actually want customers to come to. Your logo as a real file rather than a picture of your logo.

Then we tell you plainly which parts are missing and who is writing them. Content is the single largest cause of delay in website projects — not technical problems. A project where you have photographs ready, or commission them in week one, runs to schedule. A project where content is promised "next week" for five weeks takes five extra weeks.

If writing is not something you want to do, say so now and we will write it. That is a normal arrangement and it is much better than a half-finished site waiting on text.

Days four to five: domains, hosting, access

The administrative part, which we do early because it causes the most trouble when left late.

If you have a domain, we check who it is actually registered to. If it is registered to a former developer or a hosting company's account, that is the most urgent problem in your project and more urgent than anything about how the site looks.

If you need a domain, we help you choose one. Your domain is registered in your name from day one, on an account you control with the credentials handed to you, and the code lives in a repository you own. Hosting runs on our Vercel Pro account for the included first year — business sites can't use Vercel's free tier — and transfers to your own account after that. At no point does anyone but you own the domain or the code. We have explained how hosting and domains actually relate.

We also need access to your Google Business Profile, or we help you claim it if nobody has.

Why we do not show you a design in week one

Some studios will. A template with your logo dropped in, sent on day two, and it feels like progress.

The problem is what it does to the conversation. Once you have seen a layout, every discussion afterwards is about that layout — where the photo sits, whether the green is too dark — rather than about whether the site is structured to get you enquiries. We have watched projects where the wrong structure survived because nobody wanted to undo a design everyone had already admired.

The other reason is that a design made before the content inventory is a design made for text that does not exist yet. You end up writing to fill boxes, which is how a services page ends up with three paragraphs about commitment to excellence.

So week one produces documents, not pictures. It is the least exciting week of the project and it is the one that determines whether the rest of it goes smoothly.

What you get at the end of week one

A page map with the purpose of each page. A content list marked with who writes what and by when. A schedule with your dates on it. And a clear statement of what is in scope, because scope that grows mid-project is the second largest cause of delay.

Then design starts, and that takes one to two weeks. The whole build for a standard bilingual business website is four to six weeks, assuming you come back on feedback within two or three days. The full phase-by-phase timeline is here.

Two things that will slow us down

Worth saying directly, because both are fixable in week one and very hard to fix in week four.

Feedback from people who were not in the conversation. If your partner, your spouse or your manager has final say on how the site looks, they need to be looking at it from the start. Nothing costs more time than a design approved in week two and overturned in week four by somebody who had not seen it.

Answers that are "maybe." We need yes or no. A maybe becomes two versions of the same page and a decision deferred to a week where it costs more.

The commercial part, plainly

Our standard business website is $950 and a landing page is $400, with the first year of hosting and maintenance included. Payment is 50% to start and 50% on completion, so the deposit is what opens week one. Two rounds of revisions are included — the three-to-five-week estimate assumes you use them promptly rather than saving them up.

After the first year, maintenance is $95 a month. We put the full breakdown of what that buys in writing rather than making you ask.

If you are weighing up a project and want to know what the first week would look like for your business specifically, DR Web Studio builds websites for businesses across the Dominican Republic — send us a message and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.