How to plan a company website: a step-by-step guide

Planning a company website comes down to ten decisions, made in order: what the site must do, who it is for, which pages it needs, how they connect, what each page says, which domain it lives on, what it is built with, how long it will take, what design rules apply, and what happens at launch. Most of the cost and delay in website projects comes from skipping the first five and starting with design. This guide takes each step in turn, with a short answer and a link to the detailed post where one exists.

What must the site do, and for whom?

Step 1: Decide the one thing the site must do

A company website has one primary job. For most service businesses it is enquiries: a form submission, a WhatsApp message or a phone call. For others it is bookings, demo requests, job applications or downloads. Pick one. Everything else (press, careers, investor pages) is secondary and gets secondary space.

Write the job as a sentence you can measure: "A facilities manager in Dubai sends us an enquiry through the quote form." If you cannot measure it, you will not know whether the site worked. Decide now where enquiries go (which inbox, who replies, how fast), because that decision shapes the contact page later.

If your business runs on referrals and repeat clients, a site that does this one job well can be five pages. Do not plan more than you will maintain.

Step 2: Name the visitor and the question they arrive with

Most visitors are one of three people: a buyer checking you are real before replying to a proposal, a buyer who found you in search and is comparing options, or a candidate deciding whether to apply. Each arrives with a question. The buyer from search asks "do they do what I need, for companies like mine, and what does it cost?" The referred buyer asks "are they credible?"

Write down the two or three visitors and their questions. The homepage answers the most common one in its first screen. The other pages answer the rest.

Which pages does it need, and how do they connect?

Step 3: List the pages

A business website needs fewer pages than most people plan. The core set is a homepage, one page per service, an About page, a contact page, some form of proof (a portfolio, case studies or testimonials) and the legal pages. Our guide to the pages a business website needs covers what to include and what to skip.

Three decisions in this step have their own posts:

• Services: one page per service, or one page listing all of them? One page per service wins when you can say something specific about each; see service page structure.
• Proof: a portfolio page shows the work; testimonials and case studies show the result. Plan how you will collect testimonials before the build starts, not after.
• Blog: only if someone will write for it. Do you need a blog? argues the case both ways.

For each page, write one line: who it is for and what it must make them do next. Pages without a next action are usually pages you do not need.

Step 4: Draw the sitemap and the navigation

The sitemap is the list of pages arranged as a tree. Two levels deep is enough for most company sites: top-level pages in the menu, and service or project pages one level below.

Navigation is a separate decision from the sitemap. Five to seven menu items is the usual limit before people stop reading them; our post on website navigation explains how to group the rest.

Decide the URLs now. Lowercase, hyphens, the main words of the page: /services/office-fit-out, not /services/page-3. Our URL slug generator turns page titles into clean slugs. Changing URLs after launch costs you redirects and, for a while, rankings, so settle them before the build. When we start a website design and development project, the sitemap and URL list is the first document we agree with the client, before any design.

What should the pages say?

Step 5: Write the content before the design

This is the step that most often goes wrong. Design starts, content is "coming", the designer fills the layouts with placeholder text, and three months later the real copy does not fit the boxes. Write the words first, even as a rough draft. Design around real headlines and real paragraph lengths.

Each page needs a headline that says what the page is about and for whom, a first paragraph that answers the visitor's question, the body, and a call to action. Our guide to website copywriting covers how to find the words customers use and how to cut the ones they skip. The main pages have their own guides: the homepage, the About page and the contact page.

Two tools help here. The word counter keeps page lengths sensible (a service page is usually 400 to 900 words; a contact page under 150). The readability checker flags sentences that need splitting.

Gather the assets too: logo files as SVG, team photos, project images, client logos with permission to use them.

Which domain and platform should you choose?

Step 6: Choose the domain

If you already own a domain with history, keep it. Rankings and backlinks attach to the domain, and moving them is a project in itself. If you are starting fresh, choose something short, spellable over the phone, and matching your company name. Our posts on choosing a domain name and on .com vs .in vs .ae cover the trade-offs, including when a country extension helps and when it limits you.

Register the domain in the company's own account, not the agency's or a freelancer's.

Step 7: Choose the platform

For a company website the realistic choices are WordPress, a custom build (for us, Next.js), or a site builder such as Webflow or Squarespace. The decision rests on three questions: how often will your team edit the content, how much do speed and security matter to you, and what is the budget?

Our comparison of WordPress vs a custom website goes deeper, and the website cost guide puts numbers on each option.

How long will it take, and what are the design rules?

Step 8: Set the timeline and the budget

A five-to-ten-page company website takes four to eight weeks with an agency when the content is ready, and longer when it is not. How long does it take to build a website? breaks down where the weeks go. The project timeline estimator gives you a starting figure from the phases and the team size.

Budget for three things beyond the build: the domain and hosting, the content (photography, and copywriting if you are not writing it), and the first year of maintenance.

Step 9: Set the design rules before the design

Two constraints are cheaper to set at the start than to fix at the end.

Mobile first. Most visitors to a company site arrive on a phone. Design the phone layout first and expand it for desktop, not the reverse. Mobile-first design explains what this changes in practice: shorter headlines, one column, bigger tap targets, no hover-only menus.

Accessibility. Readable contrast, text that can be resized, forms with labels, images with alt text, a site that works with a keyboard. Website accessibility basics lists what a business site should meet, and the contrast checker tests your brand colours against the WCAG thresholds.

What happens at launch and after?

Step 10: Plan the launch and what comes after

Launch is a checklist, not an event. Redirects from any old URLs, forms tested end to end, analytics and Search Console set up, metadata on every page, the sitemap submitted, SSL in place. Our website launch checklist has the full list.

Then the part most plans skip: what happens in the months after. Watch Search Console for errors, check the enquiry form still works every month, update the portfolio when a project finishes, review the copy at six months. What to do after your website launches covers the first ninety days. If the site gets visitors but no enquiries, this post covers the usual causes, and most of them trace back to steps 1, 2 and 5 above.

What does the whole plan look like on one page?

Steps 1 to 5 are yours and take one to three weeks, almost all of it writing. Google's own SEO starter guide makes the same point from the search side: the site that ranks is the one organised around what visitors are looking for, with pages that answer their questions. If the content is not written, start there today; nothing else on the list is blocked by anything except it.