Clients usually ask two questions on the first call: 'How long will it take?' and 'How much will it cost?' The second is a real conversation that depends on scope and is covered in detail in our cost breakdown post. The first is this article. About six weeks, split across four phases. We've run this process dozens of times for Malaysian SMEs, F&B brands, professional services, e-commerce launches, and B2B service firms. It stays remarkably stable across industries.
Six weeks isn't a marketing number. It's the rhythm we've found that produces high-quality work without burning out the client or the team. Faster than this and corners get cut. Slower than this and momentum dies. Projects that drag past 10 weeks tend to lose stakeholder attention and ship as compromises.
Week 1: Discovery
The kickoff week. Everything starts with a 90-minute call where we map the business, not the website. Who the customer is. How the customer currently finds you. What the customer needs to feel before they buy. What's working in the current sales conversation that the website should reproduce. What's not working that we should not reproduce.
We also audit the existing digital presence in this week: the current site if there is one, the SEO position, what Google sees when it crawls you today, what your competitors look like in search results, where the gaps are. This produces a one-page brief at the end of the week. One page, not forty. The brief gets your sign-off before any design work starts. It's the document that prevents 'we ended up somewhere unexpected' conversations later.
Deliverables this week: stakeholder interview notes, sitemap draft, content audit, one-page brief signed off.
Weeks 2 to 3: Design
Two weeks for the design phase. We start with art direction: three short visual directions, each one a coherent take on what the brand could feel like online. You pick one. Sometimes you pick parts of two. Either way, by the end of week two we have agreement on the visual language and we move to layout.
We design two screens to completion: the homepage and one inner page template (typically the most important service or product page). Every other page on the site inherits from these two. This sounds like fewer deliverables than other studios show in pitches, and it is, on purpose. The reason most website projects spiral is teams designing 14 unique pages, then having to rework all 14 when the brand direction shifts in week 5. We design two, lock the system, and let the rest follow.
Deliverables this week: art direction, homepage design, inner page template, design system foundations (type scale, colour, components), two rounds of revision.
Weeks 4 to 5: Build
Two weeks of build. Next.js, Tailwind, deployed to Vercel. CMS wiring if you need ongoing content updates. We usually pick a flat-file CMS or a lightweight headless option (Sanity, Payload) depending on the team's technical comfort. Copy integration. Performance pass, and it's non-negotiable for us; every site we ship hits Core Web Vitals targets on a real Malaysian phone, not just on a developer's laptop.
You get a staging link at the end of week 4. From that point you can review real pages on real devices, not Figma mockups. Most of week 5 is iteration based on that review: small copy edits, image swaps, the inevitable 'can we make this section pop more' conversations. We allocate week 5 explicitly for this so it doesn't push launch.
Deliverables this phase: working staging site, all pages built, CMS wired, performance optimised, accessibility checked, two rounds of build revisions.
Week 6: Launch
The launch week. Final QA across browsers and devices. We test on actual Android phones and iPhones, not just Chrome DevTools. SEO setup: meta tags, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt, schema markup. Analytics installation: Google Analytics 4, plus whichever performance tool you want (we usually recommend Vercel Analytics or Plausible for cleaner data). DNS cutover during low-traffic hours.
Then handover. You get the codebase in your own GitHub. The Figma file. The CMS access. A short Loom walkthrough of how to update content. Documentation on what each part of the system does. The site is yours (code, design source, content), cleanly transferable to any other developer if you ever need to.
We also commit to one month of free post-launch fixes. Bugs we missed, small content tweaks, anything that comes up in the first 30 days of real-world traffic is covered. After that, an optional retainer for ongoing work or just our hourly rate when you need us.
What can stretch the timeline
Six weeks assumes a few things are in place. Photography is shot or sourced (or you're using stock and we're agreeing on quality). Copy is either provided or you've signed off on us writing it as part of scope. Stakeholders have decision-making authority. We're not bouncing between four people who each need to approve the homepage hero. Domain is owned and accessible.
- Custom photography shoot adds one to two weeks depending on logistics.
- E-commerce with payment integration, inventory, complex variants: adds two to three weeks.
- Multi-language launch (Bahasa Malaysia + English from day one): adds one week for translation review and quality check.
- Full content rewrite when copy is unclear: adds one to two weeks of writing time.
- Stakeholder availability gaps are variable. We work around them, but they're the most common cause of timeline slip.
What you should ask any studio about their process
Whether you work with us or someone else, three questions worth asking before signing:
- What's in your one-page brief format? If they don't have one, every project starts from scratch and ambiguity costs you time.
- Do you ship a staging site mid-project, and when? If you only see the work at the end, you have no leverage to course-correct.
- Do I own the codebase and design files at handover? If they retain ownership or lock you into proprietary tooling, you're trapped on their retainer for life.
Six weeks. Four phases. One brief. Two designed templates. Staging at week four. Code and Figma yours at week six. That's the whole shape of how a website project should run.
