Week by week
Week one is decisions, not screens. Who the site is for, the one action it has to produce, what pages exist, and which of them are collections rather than static pages. We also find out what content actually exists today, because that is the single biggest predictor of whether week three holds.
Nothing gets drawn until those answers are written down. A design made while the offer is still moving is decoration with a deadline, it gets redone, and the redo is what eats the schedule.
Week two is design. Every page drawn at desktop, tablet and phone, with the states included: hover, empty, error, loading. States are where “nearly finished” designs go to die, so they are part of the deliverable rather than something the build invents later.
Week three is build, content load, QA and launch. The CMS collections get their fields, the forms get their routing, the pages get tested at the three widths they were drawn at, and the site goes live.
One rule holds the whole thing together: one round of changes per stage, and then the stage closes. Not because feedback is unwelcome, because feedback that arrives after the next stage started is a rebuild wearing the word “tweak”.
When the date isn't yours
Some projects have a deadline that belongs to something outside the project: a funding round, a trade show, a season, a programme that runs on a calendar. The Bridgeman Awards site is that shape: an awards programme where entries open and winners get published on dates nobody on the project controls.
When the date is external, it should be the first thing in the brief, not a detail that surfaces in week two. It changes what we recommend: fewer pages built properly beats more pages built to a date.
What makes it four
Content that arrives late. This is the cause in most cases that slip, and it is almost never the client being slow, it is that nobody owned the copy. Decide the owner in week one.
Fonts that turn out not to be licensed. Discovered in week three, this stops a launch cold. It takes ten minutes to check in week one.
A second decision-maker who appears late. If someone can veto the design, they should see it in week two, not after it is built.
Scope added after sign-off. A new page in week three is a new week. That is not a penalty, it is arithmetic, and it is a fine trade to make knowingly.