Website Content Preparation Checklist: What to Give Your Designer

Ask any designer in Kathmandu what delays websites most and you'll get one answer: waiting for content. The design is approved, the site is built, and then everything stalls for three weeks because the About page text and the product photos live somewhere between "almost ready" and a cousin's laptop. This website content preparation checklist exists so your project never enters that limbo. Gather these items before the project starts and you become every designer's favourite client, and, more usefully, you get your site weeks earlier.

The Non-Negotiables

Without these, work can't properly begin.

• Logo in its original format. The AI, PSD, SVG or at least a high-resolution PNG with transparent background. Not a photo of your signboard. If the original is lost (very common), say so on day one so a redraw can be scoped.
• Exact business details. Legal name, address as you want it displayed, phone numbers, email, opening hours, and your Google Map location pin. Typos here end up on your own website, so have one person verify them.
• Your services or products, listed. Just a list at first. Names, one-line descriptions, prices if you show prices. A hardware shop with 6 categories is a different build from one with 60.
• Social media and contact channel links. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the WhatsApp or Viber number that should receive enquiries. Confirm that number is actually monitored.

Text: Write Badly, But Write

Owners freeze on text because they think it must be polished. It doesn't. A rough paragraph about your business in Nepali or English, typed on your phone, is enough for a good designer or copywriter to shape. What nobody can shape is a blank page. For each page, aim for: what you do, who it's for, why you over the shop next door. Three answers, however clumsy. At WebsNP we routinely tidy client drafts as part of the build; what we can't do is invent your trekking permit process or your warranty terms from thin air.

Images: The Honest Rules

Photos make or break local business sites, and there are only three rules. First, real beats stock: your actual restaurant, your actual team, your actual workshop, even shot on a decent phone in daylight. Second, send originals, not WhatsApp-compressed copies; WhatsApp quietly destroys image quality, so use email, Google Drive, or a pen drive. Third, landscape orientation for banners. A vertical photo cannot become a horizontal banner no matter how much anyone wants it to.

Budget tip: a half-day local photographer in Kathmandu runs roughly NPR 5,000 to 15,000 and improves a website more than NPR 50,000 of extra design work. Not mandatory. Just the best money-to-impact ratio available.

The Access List

If anything already exists, your designer needs the keys, and hunting for them mid-project wastes days.

• Existing domain login (or at least the registrar name and account email)
• Existing hosting or cPanel credentials, if migrating
• Google Business Profile access, so the new site links up correctly
• Any old website admin login, if content is being carried over

Can't find some of these? That's normal, and it's fixable, but it's fixable slowly. Flag missing access on day one, not on launch week.

What Not to Prepare

Skip these, they waste your time: fifty near-identical photos (send your best fifteen), Word documents with fonts and colours applied (formatting gets stripped anyway), and design instructions like "make the logo bigger and use gold". Give raw material and business knowledge; leave layout to the person you're paying for layout. A client who sends a clean folder of content on day one, then trusts the process, routinely gets a site live in under a week. The folder is the whole trick.