Gather your treatment list with pricing, practitioner bios and credentials, your photography and before-and-after assets, and your booking platform details before your first call with a designer. Projects that stall or run over timeline almost always stall on missing content, not on design decisions, and a clinic that shows up prepared moves through the process noticeably faster than one that's gathering information as the project unfolds.
We've run projects where the design work itself took three weeks and projects where it took ten, and the difference almost never came down to design complexity. It came down to how long it took the clinic to produce a final treatment list, approve practitioner bios, or deliver usable photography. Preparation isn't busywork before the real project starts. It is the real project, and the design moves fast once it's done.
Table of contents
Your complete treatment list and pricing structure
Practitioner bios and credentials
Photography and before-and-after assets
Booking and payment platform details
Brand assets and existing content
Setting a realistic timeline before you start
FAQ
1. Your complete treatment list and pricing structure
List every treatment you offer, grouped by category, with your actual pricing or pricing range for each one. This sounds basic, but it's the single most common source of delay we see, because clinics often haven't actually finalized their own pricing structure in writing before starting a website project, especially for treatments with variable pricing based on units, areas, or packages.
Decide upfront how you want pricing presented: exact numbers, ranges, or starting-at pricing, and make that decision consistent across every treatment rather than mixing approaches page by page. This connects directly to treatment menu clarity, since a clinic with a long, unorganized list of treatments needs a curation decision made before the website can present it well, and that decision is faster to make before the design process starts than during it.
2. Practitioner bios and credentials
Write out each practitioner's actual title, license type, certifying body, years of experience, and a short professional background, not a generic paragraph about passion for aesthetics. Our guide on showcasing practitioner credentials explains exactly why specificity here matters so much, both for patient trust and for how AI tools and search engines evaluate your clinic's credibility.
Gather headshots for every practitioner featured, ideally professional ones, though a well-lit smartphone photo works in a pinch if a professional shoot isn't scheduled yet. Missing headshots are one of the most common last-minute scrambles in a project, so confirming you have usable, current photos of every team member avoids a delay right before launch.
3. Photography and before-and-after assets
Decide which before-and-after photos you're going to use, confirm you have documented patient consent for each one, and organize them by treatment category. This is also the point to review our guide to before-and-after galleries for how these should actually be presented, since the format you choose affects what photos and documentation you need gathered in advance.
Space and team photography matters too. If you don't already have professional photos of your clinic interior and team, decide now whether you're scheduling a shoot before the project starts or working with what you have for launch and updating later. Clinics that wait on photography often end up delaying their entire launch waiting for a shoot date, when the smarter move is launching with decent existing photos and swapping in professional ones once they're ready.
4. Booking and payment platform details
Confirm which scheduling platform you're using, whether that's Boulevard, Vagaro, Mindbody, Aesthetic Record, or Squarespace's own built-in scheduling, and have your account access details ready to share with your designer. If you haven't chosen a platform yet, make that decision before the website project starts, since the booking flow design depends heavily on which system you're integrating.
Know whether you want deposits collected at booking, and if so, how much and through what payment processor. This single decision affects the entire booking flow design, and clinics that haven't settled it before the project starts often end up redoing booking pages mid-project once the decision finally gets made.
5. Brand assets and existing content
Pull together your logo files in their original formats, your brand colors if they're defined, and any existing copy you want reused rather than rewritten from scratch. If your brand hasn't been formally defined, that's fine, but say so upfront rather than discovering partway through the project that brand decisions still need to be made alongside the website itself.
Gather any existing analytics or booking data from your current site if you have one. Knowing which treatment pages currently get the most traffic, or where visitors tend to drop off before booking, gives real direction to the new site's structure instead of starting entirely from guesswork.
6. Setting a realistic timeline before you start
Once your content is actually gathered, not just planned to be gathered, set your project timeline based on your chosen build type. Review our breakdown in cosmetic clinic website cost in 2026 for realistic timeframes by build type, and build in buffer time for review rounds, since most delays after kickoff come from slow feedback turnaround rather than the design work itself.
Assign one person on your team as the single point of contact and decision-maker for the project. Projects that get decisions from multiple people at different points, with conflicting feedback, take noticeably longer than projects with one clear approver, even when the actual design work is identical.
FAQ
What if we don't have professional photography ready yet?
Launch with the best available photos and plan a professional shoot for a near-term update. Waiting on photography before launching the entire site usually costs more in delayed timeline than launching with decent interim photos.
How detailed does our pricing information need to be before starting?
At minimum, have a price or clear range for every treatment category. You don't need every variation finalized, but vague placeholders like "pricing varies" across the board will slow down the content and design process.
Do we need our booking platform fully set up before the website project starts?
You need the platform chosen and your account created, but it doesn't need to be fully configured with every service and provider yet. The integration work can happen in parallel with the website build.
Should we gather competitor examples before our first call?
It helps. Three to five competitor or inspiration sites, with notes on what you like and don't like about each, gives your designer a faster, clearer starting point than starting from abstract preferences.
How much does poor preparation actually add to a project timeline?
In our experience, poor preparation can roughly double a project's timeline, turning a planned six-week build into twelve weeks or more, almost entirely due to back-and-forth gathering content that should have been ready before the project started.
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