Have a website built.

The process has six steps, and four of them need active work from you. The timings below apply to a company site of five to ten pages with one contact person who is allowed to decide.

• 1. First conversation, 30 to 60 minutes. What should the website be found for, who visits it, what action should it trigger, what stays from the existing site, and what budget are we working within. A conversation without a budget frame produces a quote that nobody can compare.
• 2. Quote with a scope description, 3 to 7 days. What matters is not the number at the bottom right but the list above it. How many pages, which languages, which functions, how many rounds of revisions, who writes the copy, who sources the images, what happens after go-live. Without that list you will later be comparing quotes that mean different things.
• 3. Concept and site plan, 1 to 2 weeks. This is where it is decided which pages exist and which question each one answers. It is the step with the greatest long-term effect and the least visible output — it looks like nothing, and it determines whether the website is found later.
• 4. Design draft, 1 to 3 weeks. Usually a draft of the home page and one typical inner page, then one or two rounds of revisions. Fix the number of rounds in advance. Unlimited revisions are not a courtesy; they are the most common reason a project never ends.
• 5. Build and content, 2 to 4 weeks. Programming, loading in copy and images, building the forms, the technical groundwork. It runs alongside content production — and waits for it when the content does not arrive on time.
• 6. Sign-off and go-live, 3 to 10 days. Testing on devices and browsers, checking that forms actually send, setting up measurement, putting the legal pages in place, and on a rebuild setting the redirects from the old addresses and submitting the sitemap. This step is regularly underestimated, and it is the only one where mistakes become visible immediately.

Added up: two to three weeks for a single focused page, four to eight weeks for the classic company site, two to four months for a large site with language versions, integrations or a shop. If you are replacing an existing website, the relaunch checklist belongs on the table before step six — the redirect list is the part whose absence you only notice three months later, in the visits you have lost.

Four things come from you: the subject matter, usable images, the access credentials, and one person who decides. Everything else can be bought in. These four cannot, and that is why almost every delay hangs on them.

Content. An agency can phrase, structure and prepare copy for search. It cannot know which four services you actually sell, why customers buy from you rather than from the business next door, which questions always come up in a sales conversation, and which figures you are allowed to quote. The fastest route is rough notes from you that we edit — not a blank page waiting for inspiration.

Images. Check early whether the pictures you have are usable: resolution, framing, how current they are, and above all the licence. Images from an earlier collaboration may not automatically be reused. If new material has to be produced, a photo shoot is its own block in the schedule with its own lead time. It belongs in the plan, not in the final phase.

Access. Domain and DNS, the existing editing system, hosting, the analytics tool, the Google Business Profile, and where relevant font licences and any booking or inventory systems. Settle before the start whose name the domain is registered in. Finding it still registered to a former employee or a previous agency is not an exception, and in the worst case it costs weeks.

Decisions and approvals. Name one person who can decide within a few days and make it stick. Projects in which every draft passes through a committee do not take slightly longer; they take several times as long. Reckon on two to four hours of your own time a week across the project. Anyone who does not have those hours should postpone the start rather than cut the scope.

That names the three most common fracture points: copy that never gets finished, approvals with no clear decision-maker, and a scope that grows during the build while the date and the price stay where they were. All three are avoidable, but only before the start.

Professional is not a matter of taste. It is a list of checkable properties, and you can verify every single one of them yourself at sign-off. Anyone who wants a professional website built should put these points into the scope description instead of relying on the word.

• Loading time on a phone. Not on office wi-fi on a large screen, but out and about. Measurable through the Core Web Vitals; ask for a measured value after go-live rather than a promise before it.
• One URL per search intent. Four services that answer four different queries need four pages. One long home page that touches on everything once competes, on every one of those queries, against providers who have a complete page of their own for it.
• Its own title and description per page, and exactly one H1. Repeated titles across several inner pages are the most common silent fault in finished projects. It takes five minutes to check and costs months later.
• Structured data. JSON-LD that tells search engines and AI systems unambiguously who the provider is and which service is being described. Without that markup a system has to guess.
• Legal pages that belong to this website. The duty to inform under article 19 of the revised Swiss Data Protection Act requires a statement of which data this website actually collects, where it is processed and who receives it. A template copied from elsewhere describes what the template assumed instead. That is an assessment and not legal advice — in case of doubt the text belongs in front of a lawyer.
• Operable without a mouse, and with sufficient contrast. Private Swiss companies are not generally bound by the WCAG criteria, but more and more larger clients and tenders ask for them. Retrofitting is expensive; building it in costs almost nothing.
• An editing system your team can work in. If every change of wording triggers a request to the agency, the website is not finished. It is rented.
• A full handover. Domain registered to your company, credentials in your hands, source code with you, image licences documented.

What is deliberately missing from that list is how the site looks. Design matters and design is a matter of taste; the eight points above are not. If you want to judge how far a tool covers these points on its own, we have set that out soberly under build a website with AI.

It is not design quality that separates the two ends of the range but six scope drivers — and every one of them can be influenced before the start.

Number of pages and depth of content. Five pages each making one clear statement is a different undertaking from thirty pages with a service catalogue, locations and specialist articles. The work sits less in building the extra page than in filling it.

How bespoke the design is. A layout cleanly tuned to your brand on top of a proven structure is considerably cheaper than a freely drawn design with its own motion behaviour and special-case pages. Either can be right; the decision should just be taken deliberately.

Functionality. A contact form is standard equipment. Booking, a customer area, a price calculator, a configurator, a shop or an integration with your existing software are projects within the project — and the single strongest driver of price.

Language versions. Every additional language means translation, upkeep, technical markup and a second editorial route. Do not budget a ten per cent surcharge.

Content production. Supplying copy and images yourself shifts effort from the invoice into your own week. Buying in copywriting, photography and image editing means paying for them — and usually getting them faster.

Migration. Replacing an existing website adds data transfer, redirects and the protection of the visibility you already have. That is invisible work with very visible consequences when it is left out.

The range this moves in is CHF 3,000 to CHF 25,000 with us. The breakdown by website type, running costs included, sits on web design; if you would rather work it out yourself, the cost calculator gets you to a range in three minutes. Finished projects from within that range — from a restaurant site to a kitchen showroom — are under our work.

For a one-off build, the hourly rate decides less than three other questions: who carries on if somebody drops out, who is reachable after go-live, and whose name is on the domain and the credentials. All three routes work. They just fail in different places.

A freelance specialist fits when the brief is clearly bounded, you can provide the professional direction yourself, and working directly with one person matters more to you than an organised stand-in. The risk is concentrated: illness, a larger job elsewhere or a change of focus brings the project to a halt. So agree on interim states held in your own accounts rather than one handover at the end.

An agency fits when design, technology, content and findability are needed at the same time, when you have little time for professional direction, and when somebody should be reachable after go-live. What you pay for is not only the working hour but also cover and process responsibility. Our detailed comparison of the routes, with the criteria that actually separate providers, sits under choosing a digital agency in Switzerland.

Your own team fits when there is permanently enough work to keep a post busy, and when your business needs so much explaining that external copy would have to be expensively reworked anyway. For a single build it is almost never the cheapest option — getting up to speed on the technology, the structure and the legal pages happens once and is then not needed again.

Whichever route you take, the same test applies: before you sign, ask to be shown which comparable projects are actually live, and open one of those results on your phone. It takes two minutes and replaces half an hour of presentation. For the Zurich region we describe our own way of working under web design Zurich, and the full service picture sits under our services.

Settle ownership and access in the quote, not in the closing meeting — after go-live you negotiate from the weaker position. Five points belong in writing.

• Domain. Registered to your company, with your details as the holder. It is the only item that cannot be repaired later, only bought back.
• Access. Hosting, editing system, analytics tool, form and mail services, Google Business Profile. You should be the main account everywhere, with the agency added as an additional user — not the other way round.
• Source code and content. Full handover with the final invoice, together with a short technical introduction. With platform-bound solutions the quote should state what an export actually contains: copy and images can almost always be taken along, layout components almost never.
• Image licences. Documented with their scope of use and their term. An image licensed only for this website may not go into the brochure unchecked.
• What applies after go-live. Who updates the system, who backs up the data, within what time is a fault responded to, and what does a change cost. Without those four answers a project is not completed, only stopped.

The running costs that follow year after year — domain, hosting, upkeep — are quantified on our page get a homepage made, because for a small business they are the more decisive figure than the one-off build price.

There are three starting positions in which giving the job to us, or to any other agency, is the wrong decision — and we say so in the first conversation, even when it costs us the work.

One: nobody is searching for what you offer. If there is no meaningful search demand for your service because your customers come through tenders, referrals or a sales representative, even the best website will not generate enquiries. Then a small, clean calling-card site is right and the rest of the budget belongs where the selling actually happens. You can test this beforehand — our SEO check shows whether anyone is searching in your field at all.

Two: your business runs entirely through one platform. If most of your customers come through social networks, a marketplace or passing trade, you first need a well-kept local profile with reviews and only then a website of your own. For a local business, a properly maintained Google Business Profile almost always produces more enquiries in the short term than a website project.

Three: nobody internally owns the content. Neither for production during the project nor for upkeep afterwards. A website nobody ever writes into goes out of date within a year — and out-of-date information does more damage than a plain page. In that case either a smaller scope is right or ongoing support is needed, and that decision belongs before the build.

And a fourth case, which is said out loud less often: if you could not serve additional enquiries right now, the right moment is not now. A website that works creates work. That is the point of it — but it should not surprise anybody.