A designer can work around almost anything except an empty page. When a project stalls, nine times out of ten it is stalled on something only the client can supply - and usually something small, which is what makes it frustrating for everyone.
None of this needs to be polished. It needs to exist, in any form, so the work can start. Voice notes are fine. Photos from your phone are fine. Bullet points are better than a beautifully written paragraph that never arrives.
The eight things
What you actually sell, and what it costs
Every service or product, with prices or a price range. If you do not publish prices, decide that deliberately rather than by omission - "from £X" or "prices on request" are both fine, but a visitor who cannot find any indication of cost usually leaves rather than asks.
Photos
Of the work, the place and the people. A modern phone is genuinely good enough in daylight - what matters far more than the camera is that they are yours. Stock photos of a generic barbershop or a generic restaurant read as exactly that, and they are the fastest way to make a real business look like a template.
The basics, written down once
Business name as you want it written, address, opening hours including the exceptions, phone, email, the WhatsApp number if you use one, and every social account. These end up in a dozen places on a site and in your Google listing, and they must match everywhere.
Your logo, in the best form you have
If you have the original file from whoever designed it - anything ending .svg, .ai or .eps - that is the one. A screenshot from Instagram will work but will never be sharp. If you have no logo at all, say so early; it is a small job to set one, but not a job to discover in week three.
A paragraph about the business, in your own words
Who you are, who you serve, and what you would want a stranger to know. Do not try to write it well - write it honestly and let us shape it. The businesses whose sites sound like a real person are almost always the ones who sent something unpolished.
Two or three sites you like, and why
Competitors, or businesses in a completely different trade. The "why" is the useful part: "clear prices", "feels calm", "I found the menu instantly". That tells a designer far more than a colour preference does.
Your domain and hosting logins, if you already have a site
This is the one that surprises people. If a previous designer registered your domain, you may not have the account it sits in - and finding out on launch day is genuinely painful. Check now, while there is time to sort it out calmly.
One person who can say yes
Others can advise. One decides. Projects with two equal decision-makers do not fail, but they do take noticeably longer, and nobody involved can ever quite point to where the time went.
What if you do not have it?
Then you say so, and it gets handled - it just needs to be handled deliberately rather than discovered.
- No photos: we design around it with graphics and type, or we agree a shoot. What we will not do is fill your site with stock images of somebody else's business.
- No written content: we draft it from the call and you correct it. Correcting a draft is much faster than facing a blank page, and it is the route most of our clients take.
- No logo: a simple, well-set wordmark is usually enough to launch with and looks better than a bad logo.
- No idea what you want it to say: that is what the audit and the strategy call are for. Arriving without a brief is normal - most people do.
A note on gathering it
Do not try to assemble all eight in one sitting. Start a note on your phone and add to it over a week - prices as you think of them, a photo when the light is good, the answer you keep typing to customers. By the time the project starts you will have most of it without ever having sat down to do homework.
The full process, from free audit to launch and the thirty days of free fixes after it.
See what happens at each stage