PLANNING GUIDE
Use this checklist to make ownership, content, security and maintenance decisions before design and development begin.
Choose the primary outcome: generate qualified inquiries, explain a service, sell a product, support existing customers, publish information, or provide an online tool. A site can support several goals, but one should guide the first release.
Decide who supplies service descriptions, policies, pricing, photographs, testimonials and legal disclosures—and who approves them. Placeholder content often survives into launch when no owner is named.
The business should know where its domain, DNS, hosting, email and analytics are managed. Use individual administrator accounts, multifactor authentication and a recovery process that does not depend on one person’s device.
Document what every form collects, where the data goes, who receives it and how long it is retained. Test CRM, email, payment and scheduling integrations with realistic failure cases—not only the happy path.
Check mobile layouts, keyboard navigation, page titles, descriptions, redirects, error pages, analytics, consent behavior, backups, performance and security headers. Verify the production hostname rather than assuming staging behavior will carry over.
Every site needs an owner for updates, backups, security patches, domain renewals, broken-link checks and periodic content review. Agree on response times and what counts as an emergency before something breaks.