Howweactuallyshipamarketingsiteineightweeks
The process, week by week, for the €18k Launch engagement. No fluff, no surprises.
We quote eight weeks for a marketing-site relaunch. People ask if that’s real or if it’s a sales number. It’s real. Here’s the week-by-week.
Week 1 — Narrative. We lock the story before we open Figma. Output: a one-page narrative doc, a sitemap with real H1s (not placeholders), and a list of claims we’ll prove on the site. You sign off or we iterate for 48 hours. We don’t move on until this is signed.
Week 2 — Design foundations. Type, grid, colour, motion posture. Two directions, one picked by Friday. We don’t do three-direction beauty pageants; they waste a week and almost always reveal the client already knew which direction they wanted on Monday.
Week 3 — Hero, nav, homepage draft in Figma. Reviewed live, not via async comments. A live review with the right three people on your side takes 45 minutes; the same review over Figma comments stretches to a week.
Week 4 — Secondary pages, components, content system. We’re designing and your writer (or ours) is drafting in parallel. Nothing goes to engineering without real copy. Lorem ipsum hides problems.
Week 5 — Engineering kicks off. Production code from day one — no staging fiction. Preview URLs update on every commit. You and your team start reviewing the real thing on the real stack.
Week 6 — Content load, integrations, analytics. Everything a stakeholder asked for that was missed earlier: legal pages, cookie banners, HubSpot or Segment wiring. This week is boring and necessary; we budget for it.
Week 7 — QA, accessibility, performance. We target Lighthouse 95+ on mobile for all top pages. We fix instead of explaining — if a page dips, the page gets redesigned, not the score excused.
Week 8 — Launch. Cutover, redirects audit, 24-hour watch window, handover call. Then we’re in retainer or we’re out, depending on what we agreed in week one.
There are only three reasons we’ve ever blown the eight-week window, and they’re always one of: the narrative wasn’t signed in week one, a third-party integration surprised us (Salesforce, we’re looking at you), or the client’s internal approver changed mid-project. We’ve put explicit guardrails against each of the three into our kickoff doc.