How long does website design actually take? The agency says one month, but that feels way too long

Thirty business days is standard in Saudi Arabia, fast even. For bilingual sites, Arabic font readability and RTL layout bugs eat up serious hours. The agency isn't working solely on your account either; half that time goes into file transfers and waiting on revisions.

Just adapting the UI for Arabic is a whole separate workload on the CSS side. Form validation messages, mobile menu alignments, font sizing, and server-side redirects all require extra effort in bilingual setups. Even if coding takes 5 days, pushing to production without a staging environment would be a huge mistake.

But do you actually have the Arabic and English copy ready to hand over to the agency right now, along with professional product photos? Most of the time when people complain that "the agency is so slow," it's because the client company took weeks to deliver the content.

To prevent delays, make sure these three clauses are in your contract: 1) Design revisions capped at 2 rounds, 2) Client feedback turnaround within a maximum of 3 business days, 3) Agency providing a written status report every Monday. These terms keep the process transparent.

The real reason they said a month is because they're juggling five other projects at the same time. The actual time they spend working on your project probably won't exceed 35-40 hours total. If you don't set milestones, they won't even touch it until the last week and will rush it out in the final three days.

had something similar done in riyadh last year. the agency that promised two weeks couldn't even deliver in two months. like anyone quoting a month will probably do it right at least they're being honest.

Set up a meeting with the agency first thing tomorrow and ask for a weekly sprint schedule. Get a clear breakdown answering, "Which screens will we see on which Friday?" If they can't answer that, the timeline will drag on; if they give you a clear schedule, a month is reasonable.

At my first company I thought "come on, this can be done in a week" and had a site built on an off-the-shelf theme. The Arabic menus aligned to the left, the English fonts showed up as broken squares in Arabic and form submissions went straight to spam instead of the client. I ended up having another agency rebuild it from scratch and wasted two months. Trust me waiting a month is a cheap lesson.

The delivery terms in the contract must clearly define both parties' responsibilities. Just as with the agency's late delivery penalties, how delays in your company's approval processes will impact the timeline should also be documented in writing.

My perspective changed after experiencing that. Hasty decisions become decisions you have to fix six months later.

Every "we'll look at it later" in a meeting means unbilled work. If you post the result here, it will help others too.

There is something to watch out for. If code ownership isn't in the contract, you have no bargaining power when leaving.

If scope grows, either time or budget must grow. There is no third option. Hope this helps.

I feel the same way. If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later.

That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

There's also a measurement aspect to this. People defend habits, not processes. Resistance comes from there.

Implementing a change request process doesn't slow things down, it speeds them up.

Let me write how it's done in practice. Everything goes well for the first three months; problems arise in the fourth.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'd appreciate it if you shared the outcome.

Im curious too.

We need to make a distinction here. Weekly written progress reports are much more useful than asking for dates.

Trying to do this alone is the most expensive way. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Three different views emerged, they all complement each other. When making a decision, first look at what data you have on hand.

If I were you, I'd go this route.