A typical agency timeline for a small business website is 8–12 weeks. The actual labour inside that window is 35–50 hours. That's one engineer-week of work, stretched across three calendar months.
Where 12 weeks of "in progress" goes
- Week 1–2: Discovery, kickoff, stakeholder workshops. Calendars don't align. Decisions slip.
- Week 3–4: First design round. Then it sits for 5 business days awaiting feedback.
- Week 5–6: Revisions. Round two sits for another week.
- Week 7–9: Development. Half the time is hand-off friction between the designer and developer.
- Week 10–12: QA, content insertion, launch checklist, delays from the founder for content they haven't sent.
Of 12 weeks, maybe two weeks contain actual production. The other ten are idle time in someone's queue.
The compression trick: 10-day timelines work because the same person designs AND codes, no committees approve, content is locked at signature, and the studio carries no other client during the sprint.
What changes to make 10 days real
- One brief at signature. Lock scope, content sources, brand assets, and primary CTA. No "we'll figure it out as we go."
- Same person, full stack. No designer-to-developer handoff. The designer codes their own design.
- Async approvals. Loom + Notion, not Zoom + slide decks. Decisions in hours, not days.
- One concept, refined. Not three concepts presented for political coverage.
What you give up
Three things:
- The committee. If five stakeholders need to approve each round, 10 days is impossible. One decision-maker, period.
- The discovery deck. Strategy still happens — it just happens in writing, in 48 hours, not 14 days of workshops.
- The post-launch dust. Polish and follow-on iteration happen after launch, with the live site as the test environment.
You don't need three months. You need 10 days, one decision-maker, and a studio that's done this before. Send your scope and we'll prove it.