Seven days to build your site, three weeks waiting on your photos
The real timeline for a website is not development time. Here is where the weeks actually go, and how to be live before the November flights land.
Late September, the phone rings for the same reason every year. A restaurant owner in Grand-Case, a villa manager in St Barts, a boat rental outfit on the Dutch side: "I need a website for the season." Then comes the question that decides everything: "is that even doable?"
The answer fits in one sentence, and it usually surprises people: building the site is never the bottleneck.
How long does it take to build a website?
Between 7 and 18 days depending on the pack, starting from the completed brief. The brief is a 20 to 30 minute form, and it is what starts the clock, not the signature on the quote. Payment follows the same logic: 50% on signature, 50% at launch.
Those are the timelines we publish openly, pack by pack, and they hold because everything on our side is a known quantity: the site engine, the structured data, the French and English versions, the load tests from New York and Paris. None of that is waiting on you.
So why do some projects take two months?
Because the time does not go where people assume. On a project that slips, almost all of the delay comes from three things, and all three sit on the client's side.
Photography. By far the number one cause. A villa or a restaurant does not get built out of backlit phone snaps. If you have no professional photos, someone has to find a photographer, book a session around the weather, then wait for the files. Three weeks disappear there without anyone doing anything wrong. It is also the single item that changes the final result the most, which is why we went through it in photos that sell without slowing your site down.
Copy. Not the writing itself, that is our job. The decisions: your actual prices, your low-season hours, what a full day out includes, your cancellation policy. Until those answers exist, no page can be written.
Access. The domain bought six years ago through a registrar nobody remembers, with a password nobody has. The Google listing created by a former employee. A domain transfer takes days, sometimes weeks, and there is no way to make a registrar move faster.
What you can prepare before you even sign
Three moves, all free, that remove most of the risk of slipping:
Find out who actually holds your domain name, and check you can still open the mailbox attached to it. Get administrator access back on your Google Business Profile. And gather your current prices into a single document, the one you would hand a new hire on day one.
A client who shows up with those three things goes live on schedule. Without them, the best developer alive is sitting there waiting.
What if I want a grant?
Then add time, and above all get the order right. On the French side of St Martin, the grant application has to be filed before you commit to the spending: a project already signed is no longer eligible. So factor in the Collectivité's review time, and plan for a detailed quote up front. The conditions, the amounts and the process are laid out on our page about website grants and funding.
St Barts is outside these schemes, which are specific to the French side of St Martin.
When do I have to decide, to be live for high season?
Count backwards. A brand new site is not crawled by Google on launch day, and an updated Google Business Profile also takes a little while to settle. If you are aiming at the first November arrivals, you want to be live well before that, so the search side has time to settle and you have time to fix the two or three details that only ever show up in real conditions.
In practice: a decision made in October leaves you room, a decision made in mid-November puts you online during the season rather than ahead of it. That is not a disaster, a site that ships in December still works four months of high season. But you will have paid for part of the winter at full price.
The only promise we make
Nobody can guarantee you a first page on Google, and nobody can guarantee your photos will arrive on time. What we guarantee is narrower and entirely verifiable: a published timeline per pack, starting at a moment everyone can point to, and a launch checked together with the PageSpeed report in hand. If budget is your next question, it is covered in full in what a website costs in St Martin.
Measured, not promised.
Our website pricing is public, delivery time included, or get your quote within 24 hours.