The web designing process isn’t just a collectively technical process where the most important things are codes and aesthetics. For a professional web designer, many different steps come together to make the entire web designing process. Amongst these are the seven most important steps that can help you pull off a successful web designing process.
Posted on May 03, 2022 by Alicia
The web designing process isn’t just a collectively technical process where the most important things are codes and aesthetics. For a professional web designer, many different steps come together to make the entire web designing process. Amongst these are the seven most important steps that can help you pull off a successful web designing process.
Before moving on to these steps for an efficacious web designing procedure, we must first understand what makes a website most effective. Web design isn’t simply about colors and aesthetics or how you create a design with a logo maker for your website with these elements. Instead, it is about catering to all the needs of your clients and providing them with a website that helps their target audience connect with them, their product, and their team.
Here are the seven steps that can make your web designing process a great success:
4. Content (branding and copy)
The first step in the web design process is determining your end goal. This is done with your client or the stakeholders for the website. Identifying your goals mainly means asking a few important questions regarding the website that you’re going to design and then figuring out their answers. These answers will help you build the prototype for your website and will allow you to cater to your client’s needs perfectly.
Some of the most important things to identify are your target audience, how will your target audience interact with the website, what is the primary aim of the website (to inform, educate, or sell) and how will the website differ from its competitors.
Determining the scope of your project is a very important part of keeping the work doable for the designer. Clients mostly have a solid idea of what they are looking for at the beginning. However, as the project moves forward, they may come up with more features to add or extensions for already present features. This might often be met with an increase in budget and sometimes it may not. The fluctuating milestones can become hard for the designer to take on and deliver perfectly.
This is why the definition of the scope of the project should be done at the very beginning by outlining all major and minor deadlines, features, and other parts of the project. You can use a Gantt chart, a contract, or a database sheet for this purpose.
This is the step where you start building the skeleton of your website design. This phase includes the creation of a sitemap and wireframes for the website. A sitemap is a detailed chart that shows the hierarchy in the website design and links different pages and elements within a website with other features or pages. It also establishes an order that needs to be followed when designing the website and can be used to assess faulty architecture.
Wireframes are a visual mockup of how your website design should look at the end. A wireframe puts the sitemap in action, and stores the visual elements of a website to ensure that the design is exactly what your client wants. Tools like WebFlow and MockFlow can be used for creating brilliant mockups within a few minutes. You can also opt for paper and pencil.
A lot of website designers often leave branding and content creation for the very end of the entire process. What they don’t understand is that having content ready while you’re working on the website design makes it easy to figure how the content will fill the different sections and pages in the website. You don’t necessarily need all of your finalized content ready before you work on the design. However, a little placeholder content with an idea of what goes where will help your website designing process go smoothly.
Branding is also a really important part of content creation. When your audience reaches your homepage through your SEO-optimized content, the first thing they will see is your brand name and brand logo associated with the website. Make sure that you pay attention to the details in branding. You can use a logo maker tool to create a meaningful logos and branding materials for your website.
Focusing on your website structure or user experience (UX) is crucial to meet the needs of your customers. What do you want the visitors to your website to be able to do? How are you going to assist them through your website design? Does your website provide ease of access, search, or navigation? All of these things come under the umbrella term “website structure”. You want to ensure that your web pages are linked properly and are helpful for the visitors. You also want to ensure that navigation and search on your website are pretty simple and all the important sections or pages are highlighted to reach your audience quickly.
Now comes the real implementation of all the work you’ve been doing until now. Developing the website and making your design come to life is the most fruitful stage in the process. You can either fully code the website on your own or use frameworks provided by services like WordPress to develop your website. For testing, make sure that you use different devices such as your desktop, mobile, and tablet to view the website and check every feature. See if your icons all fit and if the color theme goes with your brand.
This is the moment that you had been waiting for from day one. Hook your website on a server and with a domain name if you haven’t already. Once that’s done, you can go live! Launch your website and share it with your client to check for further issues or improvements. This seven-step process of website designing will help you check off all the important things that will entice your client’s target audience to visit your website. When your website is successful in delivering the value required by the client, you’ll be the first one to know!
Alicia Rother is a freelance content strategist who works with small businesses and startups to boost their brand reach through creative content design and write-ups. Her area of expertise include digital marketing, infographics, branding, and graphic design. For service inquiries you can connect with her here.
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