u/Antique-Truth-2799

For people building client websites regularly, what has actually worked for collecting everything you need?

Copy, logos, photos, service details, contact information, testimonials, brand files, approvals, etc.

I’ve seen people use drive folders, forms, notion pages, email threads and project management tools.

The organization part seems solvable.

The harder question is whether the client actually completes everything without someone noticing what’s missing and following up.

Has anyone found a process where clients can work through it gradually and it mostly runs without manual chasing?

Or is follow-up just part of client work no matter what system you use?

Say you’re hired to design a website and the client provides the copy, but once you actually start laying it out, the content clearly isn’t ready.

Too long in some places, vague in others, repeated sections, missing information, headlines that don’t really say anything.

Do you:

1. Design around it anyway

2. Give them notes and wait for revised copy

3. Edit it yourself as part of the project

4. Treat content refinement as a separate paid service

Seems like one of those areas where scope can expand pretty quickly if it isn’t defined upfront.

How do you normally handle it?

Wondering how people define this in practice. Contract signed and deposit paid obviously matters, but what about everything the client needs to provide? Copy, photos, logo files, service details, testimonials, logins, final decision-maker, etc. Do you have a minimum set of things that must be ready before the project enters your schedule, or do you start anyway and work around whatever is missing? I can see the second approach keeping momentum up, but also creating a lot of unpredictable downtime.

Interested in boundaries that actually improved the working relationship rather than just sounding tough in a contract. Things like one point of contact, fixed feedback windows, requiring materials before kickoff, defined revision rounds, pausing projects when the client disappears, etc. Which boundary made the biggest practical difference, and did clients generally accept it?

Not technical stuff like hosting or DNS, I mean the things clients often don’t realize they need to decide or prepare. For example: who the site is actually for, what each service page needs to communicate, which photos are usable, who has final approval, what counts as final copy, etc. If you could give every new website client a 10-minute crash course before kickoff, what would you include?

There seems to be an endless loop with early validation. Interviews aren’t payment. Waitlists aren’t payment. People paying for a manual version still doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll adopt software. At what point do you personally say ‘this is enough evidence, build it’? Is it a number of interviews, preorders, people giving you access to a real workflow, something else?