1. Photos — real ones beat stock
A handful of photos of your actual work, your actual truck, your actual face, will always beat a polished stock photo of a stranger doing your job. Customers can tell the difference, even when they couldn’t say how. You don’t need a photographer — you need your phone and a little daylight. Wide shots of the work, a close-up or two, and one decent photo of you.
2. The exact services list, with prices
Not a rough idea — the actual list. What you do, named the way a customer would search for it, and what each one costs (or how you price it, if it varies by job). Along with your photos, this is one of the two things that most often hold a build up when it isn’t ready — every other page on the site waits on it.
3. Which phone number and email actually answer
Not the number on your old flyer — the one you’ll actually pick up. Same for email. A website is only as good as what happens after someone taps “call” or hits “send,” and it’s a bad first impression to build the whole site around contact info that goes nowhere.
4. Three sites you like — and why
You don’t need design language to point at something and say what you like about it. Three sites — competitors, businesses in a different city, anything — with a sentence each on what caught your eye: the layout, the colors, how easy it was to find the price, whatever it was. That’s worth more than a long brief, because it’s specific.
5. Domain access
If you already own a domain name, know where you bought it and have the login handy — the site can’t go live in your name without it. If you don’t have one yet, that’s fine too; it just means picking one is one of the first things to settle, not the last.
Have these five ready?
Then nothing is left waiting on you. The build itself runs about a week, then two rounds of changes before it goes live — and photos and the services list are what usually hold that up when they aren’t ready yet. Show up with these five and you’ve already cleared the two biggest ones.