The short answer: between a week and a month of work, depending on the type of site. The useful answer is a different one, and it is the one almost nobody tells you before you sign: the timeline is not decided by whoever writes the code. It is decided by whoever delivers the content, and that is almost always you.
Below are the real timelines by type of site, what "business days" means exactly — which is not the same as days — what actually delays a project, and what you can have ready in advance so yours is not one of the late ones.
The timelines, by type of site
| Type of site | Typical market timeline | What is being done |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-made template | 1 – 3 days | Filling in a design that already exists |
| Landing page | 1 – 2 weeks | One page, one single goal |
| Corporate site | 3 – 6 weeks | Several pages, a blog, search work |
| Online store | 4 – 12 weeks | Catalogue, cart and card payments |
| Custom platform | 3 months or more | Bookings, internal systems, things that did not exist |
These are working timelines, not waiting timelines. That is: they count from the moment whoever is building has everything they need to start. That nuance looks small and it is the cause of half the projects that finish late.
What "business days" means (and why you should translate it)
A business day is a working day: Monday to Friday, no Saturdays, Sundays or public holidays. Almost the whole market quotes this way, because it is the only thing the agency controls.
The rule for turning it into a calendar is simple: divide the number of business days by five and you get the weeks. Five business days are one working week. Ten are two. Twenty are four, which is practically a month on the wall calendar.
Then add the holidays. The Dominican Republic has around twelve national holidays a year, several of them moved to the nearest Monday, plus Good Friday. A twenty-business-day project that starts the week before Easter does not finish in four weeks: it finishes in five. If your launch depends on a specific date — a season, a trade fair, a campaign — this is not a detail.
That is why it is worth asking for both things: the number of business days and the delivery date on the calendar. If whoever is quoting cannot give you the second, they are not clear on the first either.
How the time is divided up inside
In any serious project, large or small, the time splits roughly into these five stages. They change in size, not in order.
- Kick-off. You settle which pages exist, what each one says and what the site has to achieve. This is where it gets decided whether the rest runs smoothly or stumbles.
- Structure and design. How it looks and in what order the information appears. This is the stage where you take part the most, and where everything jams if nobody decides.
- Build. The coding. This is the part people think is the whole project, and it is usually less than half.
- Review. You see it finished and note the changes. One round of changes fits in the timeline; the fifth round does not.
- Launch. Domain pointed, analytics connected, the site live and Google notified.
What gets cut when there is a rush is usually stage 1, which is exactly the one that must not be cut. A project that starts being coded without knowing what the page will say gets rebuilt from scratch.
What actually stretches a project
1. The content. Always the content.
Text, photos, the logo in good quality, the list of services with what each one costs. In the meeting everybody says "we have that". Two weeks later it turns out the photos are Instagram screenshots at 600 pixels and nobody has ever written down how the company differs from the other four in the same sector.
Our timelines count from the moment we receive your text and images. If the content arrives late, the timeline moves, and we say so on day one so it is not a surprise at the end. It is not a clause to cover ourselves: you literally cannot lay out a page that does not have any text yet.
Gather this before signing and you save yourself weeks:
- One paragraph per service or product, written the way you would explain it to a client on the phone.
- The logo in its original file, not a photo of the logo.
- Between ten and twenty good photos. Phone photos are fine, if they are well lit.
- The prices, if you are going to publish them. Deciding this takes longer than you think.
- The exact phone number, address and opening hours, written the way you want them to appear.
2. Decisions split across several people
A project approved by three partners moves at the speed of the slowest one. Every round of contradictory comments costs days that were not in anybody's quote. The fix is not technical: name one person who decides, and have the others give their opinion to them, not to the agency.
3. The paperwork that depends on neither you nor the agency
The domain, if you already have one, needs to be traced to whose name it is in and who holds the password. If it is a redesign, you need the previous site's credentials. And if you are going to take card payments, the payment gateway account — the company that processes the charge and passes the money to your bank — is approved by the processor, with your company's paperwork, and nobody on the technical side can speed that up.
We integrate CardNet, the Dominican processor we work with on the AlegraFest store. If you use a different one or would rather look at an alternative, we assess it before quoting. Either way the account is opened in your name, so the paperwork is yours to handle and it is worth starting on the same day the project starts, not the week before launch. A finished store waiting on a bank approval is the silliest way to lose fifteen days.
4. The catalogue, if you sell
Every product needs a name, a description, a price, variants, stock levels and at least one decent photo. Forty products take a while. Four hundred are a separate project, with their own schedule, and that has to be said out loud before anybody sets a launch date.
5. The additions halfway through
"While we're at it, can we also add…?". Every addition has a price in days, even when it has no price in money. On a corporate site, for example, each extra page is quoted separately and usually adds a day or two. It is not that it cannot be done: it is that the date has to be recalculated instead of pretending it still stands.
What does not stretch things as much as you think
Looking good on a phone. It is not a phase at the end of the project. It is designed for the phone from the first sketch, because most of your traffic will arrive from there. If somebody charges you for the mobile version as an extra with its own timeline, they are building it backwards.
Technical search work. The per-page metadata, the sitemap and the structured data Google needs are done while building, not afterwards. What does take months is Google ranking you, but that is no longer development time.
Pointing the domain. Changing where a domain points takes minutes. What can take longer is propagation: the time it takes internet providers around the world to hear about the change, which runs from a few minutes to a few hours. It is done on launch day and it is rarely a problem, but do not leave it for the morning of the event.
Five questions to tell whether a timeline is credible
- When does it start counting? "From signing" and "from delivering the content" are two different dates, and the gap between them is set by you.
- Are they business days or calendar days, and what date do they land on? Ask for the date, not just the number.
- What happens if I am late with the content? The honest answer is "the timeline moves". Anything else is a timeline nobody intends to meet.
- How many rounds of changes fit in that timeline? If there is no number, an argument is guaranteed.
- Is it in writing, with a price and a date? Spoken is not a timeline, it is an intention.
Be equally suspicious of both extremes. "I'll have it in two days" normally means a template filled in at speed. "About three months, more or less" means nobody has counted the work yet.
Our timelines
So we do not stay in generalities, these are ours, the same ones published on the site:
| Package | Timeline | On the calendar | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing Page | 5 business days | ≈ 1 week | RD$35,000 |
| Corporate Website | 12 business days | ≈ 3 weeks | RD$85,000 |
| Online Store | 20 business days | ≈ 4 weeks | RD$165,000 |
They count from the moment we have your text and images, and the price and timeline are fixed in writing before you pay anything. If you need several landings for different campaigns, each additional one on the same base design costs RD$15,000 and comes out faster than the first, because the only things that change are the text and the images.
You can see what each package includes, a delivered project with its numbers, or the other half of this question: how much a website costs in the Dominican Republic.