The reason for that shape is that most technical decisions follow from commercial ones. What the site says depends on who it is for. Which pages exist depends on what you sell. What the advertising targets depends on what you charge. Those answers only exist in your head, and no amount of process substitutes for getting them out.
Expect the first fortnight to involve several conversations and some homework. Descriptions of your services, photographs of your work, your actual prices, and access to whatever already exists. None of it needs to be polished, and the delay is caused by the absence of an answer rather than the quality of one.
Content is reliably the largest demand and the one most underestimated. Writing about your own business is harder than it appears, and the request arrives alongside running the business. Scheduling that writing rather than intending to do it is what determines whether a project stays on time, and a business that blocks two hours produces in one sitting what would otherwise take a month.
After that the demand drops substantially. Reviewing work, answering occasional questions, and making decisions as they arise. For most projects that is somewhere between one and three hours a week, concentrated into a review at each stage rather than distributed as interruptions.
Reviews are worth doing properly rather than quickly, since a considered response at each stage prevents rework later. Fifteen minutes spent on a draft that produces specific feedback is worth considerably more than a rapid approval followed by a change of mind after the next stage is built on it.
Be honest about your availability at the start rather than discovering it, because that shapes the schedule. A business owner working evenings around a job has a different rhythm from one with weekday time, and a project planned around the wrong assumption stalls at the first review. Saying so upfront means the timeline reflects reality.
Understand that your time is what determines the project length more than mine. The technical work is estimable and predictable. Waiting for a decision or a piece of content is what extends a schedule, and the projects that finish quickly are the ones where somebody protected a couple of hours a week rather than fitting it around everything else.
Then expect the demand to return briefly at the end, for review, approval, and the handover of anything you will operate yourself. That final stretch matters because it determines whether you can actually run what was built, and skipping it is how businesses end up with something they own and cannot edit.
Block the time rather than fitting it around everything else, because a project that depends on found moments moves at the speed of your quietest week. Two protected hours produces more than five interrupted ones, and it is the single variable that most affects how long the whole thing takes.
Nominate one person to make decisions if there is more than one owner, since a project waiting on agreement between two people moves at the pace of their availability combined. That is frequently the largest hidden delay and it is resolved by a conversation before the work starts.
Expect the review stages to need more attention than the kickoff, since that is where decisions become concrete and changing course is still possible. A quick approval at that point frequently costs more time later than a considered one would have.