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Step one: define pages and purpose
Start by listing the few pages the business truly needs and the single action each should prompt. Take a neighborhood bakery as the worked example: home, menu, catering enquiry, and location with hours. The home page should lead to the menu, the menu to ordering or visiting, and catering to a short enquiry form. Write one sentence per page stating who it serves and what the visitor should do next. Anything that does not support those actions moves to a later phase, which keeps the first build small enough to finish and review properly.
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Step two: gather content before design
Most delays come from missing material, so the checklist should collect content early. For the bakery, that means product photos, a price list, opening hours, the address, a short story paragraph, allergen wording the owner has confirmed, and a contact email. Assign each item to a named person with a due date. Mark placeholders clearly so nothing unfinished is published by accident. Design can begin once the core text and images exist, because layouts shaped around real content need fewer revisions than layouts filled with sample copy later.
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Step three: test, launch and hand over
The final section of the checklist covers what happens before and after going live. Test forms by sending messages to the owner, check pages on a phone, confirm the domain and email settings, and verify that contact details match the shop window. After launch, record who holds logins, where files are stored and how to edit the menu page. Schedule a short review a few weeks later to fix small issues. The bakery then owns a working site and a written record, so the next improvement starts from facts rather than memory.