How long does a website take to create?

Typical timelines by project type.

• Focused marketing site (5 to 10 pages): three to six weeks.
• Larger site with heavy content or many service pages: six to ten weeks.
• E-commerce or custom functionality: six to twelve weeks, depending on how much engineering the features need.
• Redesign of an existing site: often faster than a new build, because the content already exists, the range just depends on how much of it survives.

Two caveats worth considering: first, calendar time and working time are different things: a three-week project isn't three weeks of full-time work, it's work interleaved with rounds of your feedback. Second, the single biggest variable isn't necessarily the developer. It's how quickly content and decisions arrive, which is covered below.

Where the time goes, step by step.

1. Discovery & strategy (about a week)We dig into your audience, competitive landscape, and goals before writing a line of code. This is also where scope, platform, and price get fixed, so nothing surprises you later. Choosing the platform is its own decision; our platform guide walks through how that call gets made.
2. Design (one to two weeks)Layouts and visual direction shaped around your brand and your visitors' path to becoming customers. You review real designs in progress, not a big reveal at the end, which is what keeps revision cycles short.
3. Build (one to three weeks)The approved design becomes a real site: clean code, fast load times, mobile layouts, and SEO fundamentals like structured data baked in. Custom features get built and tested here too.
4. Launch (a few days)The unglamorous checklist that ensures a smooth launch: redirects from old URLs, analytics, search-engine indexing, forms tested, backups configured. Then the site goes live, and support continues after it does.

What actually makes timelines slip.

When a website project runs long, it usually isn't the code. In rough order of frequency:

• Content arrives late. The number one schedule-killer in this industry. A site can't launch without its words and images, and gathering them always takes longer than expected.
• Feedback trickles in. Five people sending notes separately over two weeks costs more time than one consolidated list sent in two days.
• Scope grows mid-build. Good ideas show up once the site starts taking shape. Some are worth adding immediately; others are better shipped as a fast follow after launch. A good builder helps you tell the difference instead of silently letting the deadline slide.

How to keep your project on schedule.

• Start gathering content on day one. Copy, photos, logos, testimonials. If writing isn't your thing, say so early; structuring and polishing copy is part of the work we scope.
• Name one decision-maker. Gather opinions from anyone, but have one person with the authority to say "approved."
• Batch your feedback. One consolidated list per review round beats a stream of one-off messages, every time.
• Trust the deadline pressure. Hard dates are workable when they're known up front. The Santa Fe International Literary Festival site had an immovable event date and a deluge of time-sensitive updates, and shipped on time because the process was built around that fact.

What happens after launch.

Launch day is the start of the useful part, not the finish line. New builds carry a care plan for the first year, billed separately from the build, covering ongoing maintenance and support, hosting for sites we host, and edit time on the higher tier, and after that it's month to month. Either way, you'll know before kickoff exactly what the timeline is for your project, because it's part of the quote. Speaking of which: here's what we charge, and here's what websites cost in this market generally.