How long does it take to build a website in Morocco?

The short answer

A well-scoped brochure site takes a few weeks. An online store takes months. French-language agencies that publish ranges most often quote four to ten weeks for a presentation site and two to four months for e-commerce — figures that agree with one another, and with what a properly prepared project actually takes.

That range assumes one thing almost no real project satisfies: that the content exists and the decisions have been made. In practice, the difference between a site delivered in six weeks and the same site delivered in six months is never development speed.

The stages, and what each one really requires

A web project always follows the same sequence. What changes from one project to the next is how long each stage takes — and that depends mostly on who owes what to whom.

• Scoping. Objectives, site structure, scope. Fast when one person can decide; endless when every trade-off goes to a committee.
• Design. Mockups of the main templates, not of every page. Budget two or three rounds; beyond that it is no longer design work, it is a decision that was never made at scoping.
• Build. The most predictable stage of the project, because it is the only one that depends on the supplier alone.
• Content. Copy, photography, legal pages, product listings. Almost always the critical path. See below.
• Testing and fixes. Mobile, forms, error cases. One to two weeks when feedback arrives in one batch.
• Launch. Hours, technically. Days when the domain or the hosting access sits with someone nobody can reach.

What actually delays a project in Morocco

Four causes recur, and none of them is technical.

• The content isn't ready. The leading cause, by a distance. A ten-page site needs ten pieces of copy, and nobody writes them until the design is approved — while the design cannot be approved without knowing what it has to hold. The way out of that loop is to write the copy alongside the scoping, not after it.
• The online payment file. For a store, opening a bank gateway means an application, supporting documents and an approval that depend on neither you nor your supplier. That file starts at the beginning of the project. Started at the end, it adds weeks to a site that is otherwise finished.
• Serial sign-off. Three people reviewing one after another add three cycles. The same three reviewing at once, with one named decision-maker, add one.
• The local calendar. Ramadan, the summer break, financial year-end: approval cycles simply get longer. That is not an obstacle, it is a planning input — as long as it goes into the plan at the start.

How to hold a date

A launch date holds when you reduce the number of things that must all be true at once. Three decisions usually do it.

Launch with fewer pages. A six-page site that is live beats a twenty-page site waiting on copy. The other fourteen can follow without holding up the first six.

Name one decision-maker. One person on the client side who settles things. Not a committee: a name.

Start the paperwork on day one. Domain, hosting, the bank file if there is one. Those are external lead times; they either run alongside the project or they get added to the end of it.

What a back-planned schedule must contain

A useful schedule does not list the supplier’s stages: it lists the deadlines that depend on you, because those are the only ones that slip.

• The target launch date, and the event behind it if there is one — a trade show, a season, a campaign. A date with no reason moves; a date tied to an event holds.
• The copy delivery date, page by page, with a name against each. "The content" is not an assignable task.
• The photography date, if any is needed. The line most often discovered mid-project, and it depends on weather, a location and someone’s availability.
• The two review windows, with the person who decides and the deadline past which silence counts as approval. Without that last clause, a project stops on an inbox that went on holiday.
• The start of external paperwork — domain, hosting, bank file — dated in week one, not "before launch".

Frequently asked

And at Noor Studio Agency?

We put the launch date in the scope, and the proposal lists what that date assumes from you — which copy, which photography, which sign-off, in which week. A date that does not state its assumptions is not a date.