If you've never commissioned a website before, the process is harder to picture than it should be. You know roughly what you want at the end. What happens in between is mostly invisible until you're in it.
We run this process regularly, and the same handful of things surprise people every time. Here's what actually happens, in order, including the parts that don't usually make it into a proposal.
It starts with questions, not designs
A designer worth hiring will open with a conversation rather than a price. What does the business do, who buys from it, what should the website accomplish, what already exists in terms of logo, photos and written content.
This can feel like a delay when you just want to see something. It isn't. A designer who quotes you a number before understanding the business is quoting for a generic site, and a generic site is what you'll get.
You can make this stage much shorter by turning up prepared. Have two or three websites you like, and be ready to say what you like about each one, because "it looks nice" isn't something anyone can build from. Bring your logo files if they exist. Bring a rough list of the pages you think you need. Bring your brand colors if you have them settled.
You should see something real before you sign anything
This is where practices differ, and it's worth knowing what you're entitled to ask for.
Plenty of designers will show you a mood board, a color palette and some font samples, then ask for a signature and a deposit before anything resembling your actual homepage exists. That's a normal way to work, but it puts the risk on you. You're committing to an outcome you've only had described.
We build real homepage mockups for prospective clients before a contract exists, because we'd rather you rejected a direction early than discovered it was wrong in week four. Not every designer works this way and there are reasonable arguments against it, but you can always ask. Someone confident in their work will usually be willing to show you something concrete.
The contract is where you check the boring things
Once you've agreed to proceed, you should get a written agreement covering scope, timeline, price and payment terms. Read it properly, and pay particular attention to four things people routinely skim past.
What's actually included, page by page and feature by feature. How many rounds of revisions you get before extra charges apply. What happens when scope changes halfway through, because it usually does. And who owns the finished website, the domain, the hosting account and the content when it's over. That last one matters more than it sounds. We've met businesses who discovered they couldn't move their own website because the previous developer held the domain.
Also check what's excluded. Copywriting, photography, hosting and ongoing maintenance are commonly separate line items, and a quote that looks cheap sometimes looks that way because three of those are missing from it.
Design comes before build, and that's when your opinion counts most
Most projects show you the homepage design first and wait for approval before building anything else. This is deliberate. Changing a layout while it's still a design costs an afternoon. Changing it after the whole site has been built on that layout costs a week.
So spend your attention here rather than saving it for the end. Give feedback in writing, and be specific about the problem rather than the solution. "The header feels too formal for the kind of clients we want" gives a designer something to work with. "I don't like it" gives them nothing, and you'll get a second version that misses in a different direction.
One more thing that sounds trivial and isn't: collect everyone's feedback before you send it. A designer who receives three separate messages from three people in your business, each contradicting the last, will either stall or pick one at random. Neither is what you want.
Content is almost always the bottleneck
Here's the part nobody warns clients about clearly enough. The most common reason a website project runs late is not the designer. It's waiting for the client's text and photos.
It happens for understandable reasons. Writing an About page about your own business turns out to be genuinely difficult, and it's the kind of task that slides to the bottom of the list behind actual work. But the project stops dead while it's pending. A build that should have taken five weeks becomes nine, and from the outside it looks like the designer was slow.
If you do one thing to keep your project on schedule, have your content ready before the project starts. If writing it yourself isn't realistic, sort that out at the proposal stage rather than discovering it in week three.
Review it on a phone, not on your laptop
Before launch you'll get a link to a staging version. Check it properly, and check it on an actual phone, because that's where most of your visitors will be.
Read every page for typos and outdated information. Click every link. Submit the contact form yourself and confirm the message arrives at the right inbox, which is the single most commonly broken thing on a newly launched site. Tap the phone number and make sure it dials. Then compile all of it into one message rather than sending eleven.
Launch isn't the last step
When the site goes live, a responsible designer should walk you through updating it yourself, confirm analytics are recording, and submit the site to Google Search Console so it can start appearing in search.
Ask what happens next, too. Whether there's a support period included, what it covers, and what ongoing maintenance costs if you want it. A website is software. It needs occasional attention, and the arrangement for that is better agreed now than during an outage.
What makes a project go smoothly
Almost every project that finishes on time has the same three characteristics. The client knew what they wanted the site to achieve, the content was ready, and one named person made the decisions.
Almost every project that overruns is missing at least one of those. Your designer's job is to build the site. Getting them what they need, on time, is yours, and it has more effect on the outcome than most people expect.
If you're weighing up what a project like this should cost before you start talking to anyone, our honest breakdown of website pricing in the Philippines covers the realistic ranges by provider type, and how long a website actually takes to build sets out the timeline by project size.