Gantt Chart Example: Website Redesign Project
Example Gantt chart for a 12 week B2B website redesign, four workstreams, phase dependencies, milestones, and a managed schedule disruption.
When You Would Build This
Team: 5 people. One project manager, one UX designer, two front-end developers, one content strategist. Project: Full redesign of a B2B SaaS company marketing website including new information architecture, visual design, and CMS migration.
- Timeline: 12 weeks (60 working days).
- Constraint: Launch must coincide with a major product announcement at week 12.
- Budget: Fixed. Any schedule slip cannot be recovered by adding resources.
The Example
What makes this Gantt chart effective and realistic: the dependency structure is explicit and consequential.
What Makes This Example Work
What makes this Gantt chart effective and realistic: the dependency structure is explicit and consequential. When the Design Approval milestone slipped two days, the impact on the launch date was immediately visible in the chart without manual calculation. The PM could present three recovery options to the client the same day the delay was confirmed, rather than discovering the launch impact at week 10.
The overlap between Development environment setup (Days 19 to 22) and the Design phase was intentional: development environment work does not depend on final designs, so it was parallelized with design to recover time. This is a legitimate technique, but it only works if it is planned in the chart rather than improvised. The chart made the overlap safe by showing clearly that environment setup finished before front-end build required final files.
The two-day UAT final fixes window overlapping with UAT itself (Days 55 to 57, starting while UAT runs Days 53 to 56) reflects realistic launch logistics: minor fixes from UAT are typically worked in parallel with the client completing their review, not after. This reduces the launch prep phase by two days without adding risk, because the fixes are isolated and the developers are not touching UAT-reviewed pages.
The one thing missing from this chart that a real project would need: a risk register linked to the three tasks with the highest duration uncertainty (Visual design concepts, Front-end build, and CMS integration). All three have dependencies, parallel workstreams, and significant duration. They are the tasks most likely to produce the next schedule disruption.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the development environment setup start during the Design phase?
Development environment and CMS setup does not depend on final design files: it requires only the platform decisions made during strategy. Starting it in parallel with the Design phase recovers four days of critical path time that would otherwise be lost to sequential scheduling. The key check was confirming that the environment setup would be complete before front-end build began, which it was by a comfortable margin. This type of intentional parallelization is one of the most reliable techniques for compressing project schedules without adding resources.
How was the design delay handled without missing the hard deadline?
The project manager fast-tracked the front-end build start by using finalized wireframes rather than waiting for the complete final design files. Developer A began building page templates and component shells based on the approved wireframes on Day 34, while the UX designer completed the final visual design files over Days 34 to 35. When the final files arrived on Day 35, the developer incorporated them into the already-started templates. This produced half a day of rework but recovered 1.5 days of the 2-day slip, leaving the launch date intact.
What would a more complex project's Gantt chart look like?
A more complex project (say, a 6-month product launch with 8 workstreams and 20 team members) would use a summary-level Gantt for stakeholder communication (showing only phases and milestones) and a detailed Gantt for team execution (showing every task). The critical path calculation becomes more valuable at scale because it identifies the subset of tasks that actually control the delivery date among dozens of parallel tracks. Most enterprise Gantt chart software includes automatic critical path highlighting for this reason.