The fastest website project we have run took three weeks. The slowest took nine months. The difference was not technical. It was that one client had their photographs and service descriptions ready before we started, and the other kept promising them next week.

So this is the list. Everything we need from you before a project can begin, why each item matters, and what happens if it is missing. If you are about to commission a website from anybody, this list is useful whether or not you hire us.

The one that delays everything: content

Content is the single largest cause of delay in website projects. Not hosting, not integrations, not design disagreements. Text and photographs that do not exist yet.

Your service descriptions. What you sell, in sentences, in your own words. Not marketing copy — just an accurate description of each service, what it includes, and roughly who it is for. A paragraph each is plenty. If you have a WhatsApp message you have sent to twenty customers explaining your service, that message is usable content.

Your prices, or a decision not to publish them. Either is fine, but it has to be decided before the pages are structured, because a page built around prices and a page built to generate an enquiry are different pages. Worth knowing: in our study of AI recommendations across 117 Dominican businesses, one assistant quoted businesses' published rates back with attribution. Published numbers get repeated. Unpublished ones cannot be.

Photographs. This is where most projects stall, so here is the standard: real photographs of your actual business, taken on a decent phone or better, in daylight, not screenshots and not stock images of someone else's restaurant. If you do not have them, commission them in week one rather than discovering in week four that there is nothing to put on the page.

If writing is not something you want to do, tell us at the start and we will write it. That is a normal arrangement. What does not work is a site waiting four weeks for text somebody intends to write on a weekend.

The administrative items

These are small, and they are the ones that produce genuine emergencies when left late.

Your domain, and proof of who owns it. If you have a domain already, we need to see who the registrant actually is. If it is registered to a former developer, a relative, or a hosting company's own account, that is the most urgent item in your project. If you need a new domain, we help you pick one and it gets registered in your name on an account you control, with the credentials handed to you.

Access to your Google Business Profile. For most Dominican businesses this listing matters more than the website. In our restaurant study, 98% had a Google Business Profile and only 16% had a usable menu on a site they controlled. If nobody has claimed your listing, we help you claim it.

Your logo as a real file. An SVG, an AI file, an EPS or at minimum a large transparent PNG. A JPEG screenshot of your logo taken from Facebook cannot be used at full size or placed on a coloured background.

Any existing accounts we will need. Hosting, analytics, an email provider, a booking system you already pay for.

The decisions only you can make

Three questions that cannot be answered by us and that block the project if they stay open.

Who has final say? One person. If your spouse, your partner or your manager has veto power over how the site looks, they need to be in the conversation from week one. Nothing costs more time than a design approved in week two and overturned in week four by somebody who had not seen it.

What is the site actually for? Enquiries, bookings, sales, or credibility so people stop asking whether you are a real business. These produce different sites. "All of them" produces a worse site than picking one.

Which language comes first? Both get built, but they are not interchangeable. Our own testing found that asking four AI assistants the same question in English and Spanish produced 43 businesses with only 6 appearing in both lists. If your customers are mostly tourists, the English version is not an afterthought.

The content you already have and do not realise it

Most clients believe they are starting from nothing. Almost nobody is.

Go and look at your WhatsApp. The message you send when somebody asks what a tour includes. The voice note where you explained your pricing. The reply you have typed forty times about whether you take card. That is your services page, your pricing page and your FAQ, already written in the voice your customers respond to.

Every client we have worked with was selling through WhatsApp and Instagram before they had a website. The words already exist — they are just trapped in a thread where only one customer at a time can see them, and where no search engine and no AI assistant will ever read them. Google's guidance on AI features says plainly that important content has to be available in text form on a page.

So the practical version of "write your service descriptions" is often: forward us the five messages you send most often. We will do the rest.

What we do not need

Shorter list, and worth saying because clients often hold up a project gathering things that do not matter.

You do not need a written brief or a specification document. The questionnaire covers it. You do not need to know what CMS you want, or have opinions about hosting. You do not need a finished brand guide — a logo and a sense of whether you want the site to feel formal or warm is enough. And you do not need every photograph before we start, only enough for the pages we build first.

What happens if something is missing

We start anyway, with the parts that are not blocked, and we tell you exactly what is waiting on you and what it is delaying. We would rather run a project that is honestly behind on content than pretend a site is nearly finished when the services page says lorem ipsum.

What we will not do is launch a site with placeholder sections. We have measured where that leads — abandoned, half-built sites are one of the most common things we find in the Dominican market, including a restaurant with more than sixteen thousand Google reviews whose entire website says it is under construction.

A realistic sequence

If you want a project to run to schedule, do these in this order before you pay a deposit.

1. Decide who has final say, and tell them they are in it.

2. Write a paragraph per service, or decide we are writing them.

3. Take or commission the photographs.

4. Check who your domain is registered to.

5. Claim your Google Business Profile if nobody has.

6. Decide on prices: published or not.

That is perhaps a weekend of work, and it is the difference between three weeks and nine months.

The commercial part

Our standard bilingual 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, with two rounds of revisions. A standard build runs four to six weeks with a responsive client. The full cost breakdown is published, and so is the phase-by-phase timeline.

If you have most of this list ready and want to start, DR Web Studio works with businesses across the Dominican Republic — send us a message.