Usually if there is a token it already has a project, and/or a site, and/or a smart contract.
It starts the other way - making a project which may or may not include a white paper, then have a smart contract and getting a token after deployment.
If a person wants to do a ‘me too’ kind of project they may copy and modify existing projects and white papers.
Lots of DeFi projects took this easy road.
No special skills are required for this.
There are ready templates for smart contracts which can be used for the project. Web site creation for the project is also fairly easy.
The work on the project will speed up if the project hires one or more graduates from a ‘coding academy’ with few months of programming knowledge…