Website Design Process – Plan Before Start
You might feel that a successful website design is all about the technical aspects of its development. But in reality, what matters is the basic elements of the website and the process that goes into developing it.
A well-designed website has much more to offer than just its look and feel. Each website has something to convey about its purpose, the products that it is placing, and the services provided by the business. A good website conveys something beyond the designing aesthetic aspects. Before starting the actual website designing, it is essential to plan and prepare unique checklist of the things while developing it.
We, leading Charlotte website design company, follow a holistic website design process that involves the lifecycle of website design. Right from the starting point that revolves around knowing the business requirements thoroughly to timing the individual modules and deciding on the final deadlines for testing and hosting it on the internet, things work in a better way if we stick with the technical checklist! Having a strategy helps in tracking progress and ensures that the efforts applied are going in the right direction.
Identifying the Business Goals
The first thing that every business should take care of before plunging into building anything is knowing its core purpose. Elaborate discussions on knowing the requirements of the business are of prime importance before designing the website. We list-out the reasons for which you want your website to be designed or redesigned.
Before starting the actual website design process, we note down the answers to the following questions:
- Why are we making this website?
- Who are the target audience of the website?
- Why would the target audience visit this website?
- Who is your competition online?
- What will be the content of the website: Information, Product or Services?
- How can you be different than your competition?
- What is your website budget?
- How can we stay under budget and accomplish all your requirements?
- What kind of website do you need? Custom vs template based website
After clearly enlisting the above points, we go ahead with the process of website design in a refined way.
Content Strategy
Why do you visit a website? There are multiple reasons; sometimes just for information and some other times to buy a product or service that you have been looking for. You will revisit the website if you find exactly what you are looking for, right? The same thing applies to any business website. The chances of visiting and staying on a website increases when the visitors get what they want. The content of the website comes into picture here.
Just attractive design elements placed on the website won’t be of much help if customers are not taking back anything. Solid website content will ensure that customers keep coming back and we develop the content marketing strategy keeping in mind this aspect.
Creating Wireframes & Prototype
Before constructing a building, engineers use blueprints, which helps them visualizing the building. In a similar way, in case of website design, we prepare a prototype. That prototype gives the realization of the final website that will go live on the internet. A wireframe will give a quick overview of how the website will appear. It is equivalent to the final output except for the fact that it is not functional.
Wireframe helps in giving the preview of the design elements on website. We can alter the different aspects of website in this phase of website design. The prototype provides the flexibility to realign the entities of the website design. It’s also easy to accommodate any changes in this phase of the website design process.
Design of the Website
In this phase, we plan and execute the layout of various pages. The design of the website has a lot of weight when it comes to revisiting it. The colors, the logo of the business, the page layouts, the flow of the design elements, and the images used on the pages create a long lasting impression on the visitors.
Strong visuals on the website ensure that the message we want to convey through the website is clearly delivered. We also need right amount of word/multimedia balance, so the visitors don’t have to read extra information. Enticing images also helps in improving the engagements as well as click rates on the website. A good website design helps in generating more traffic with the help of visuals. A user-friendly and responsive website design offers a uniform format across all the devices. All these items include Design phase in website design process.
Web Development & Database Design
The web development phase involves the actual coding. Coding is require to make backend structure of the website or any software. The operations of the website right from the moment the pages are loaded to the actions that will be called upon the click of the buttons on the website will be planned out in this phase.
In this phase, we’ll also design the database schema of the website. When user enters any input in the website, database stores those input data in different format. Website administrators and owners can analyze this data to learn about customer preference.
At this phase, we get a clear picture of the integration of the front and back end of the website. After this phase, all your design we created early will be functional. We should have functionalities like login, register, share, upload, insert, calculate, etc working once this phase is complete.
Testing and Debugging
Once the whole website is in the running mode, it is necessary to test out the modules that run individually. We’ll also test their behavior and integrations as a whole. Testers use multiple testing methods to check the code, bugs and errors in the backend. Thorough checking is carried out to ensure that the pages of the website are linked properly and they load uniformly across all devices and platforms.
Testers also check the validation classes to see that the input values for various fields on the website take the appropriate values. Any bugs in the code are reported to developers and fixed during this phase of website design process.
Launching the Website and Tracking
The website design is a continuous process, because there will always be something that needs to be improved or updated to keep up with the trends on the internet. When the website is launched, various things need to be analyzed about the visitor behavior which in turn will be helpful in improvising the website design. We integrate Google Analytics in all the websites we design.
Each business has different needs regarding what needs to be tracked. But common things that need to be tracked for most businesses are;
- Number of people who are visiting the website (new users vs returning users)
- The reason why they are visiting, what they are looking for and how did they find the website
- Who visits your competitor’s website, how are those visitors finding your competitor’s website
- Why are visitors selecting your competitor’s website over yours or vice versa
- Where are your website’s visitors located, which devices are they using to find and use your website
- The pages on which they are staying the most
- If they are leaving the page, what triggers that action
- How much time they are spending on the pages of the website
- Are they taking any actions, if not, then finding the reasons for it
- And much more depending on each business
Once we get a clear understanding of the above points, we proceed with the steps to make changes in the website design to address these concerns.
Analysis and Improvisation
Keeping an eye on the website design and inculcating changes to fit in the newer trends is a process that keeps going throughout the lifecycle of website design. It requires constant analysis of the website data. The number of visitors, their browsing behavior and the type of content that is likely to capture their attention needs to be monitored constantly.
With the help of the analyzed data, we keep changing and improvising the website design both aesthetically and content-wise.
The above-mentioned points form our website design process. The same steps are followed while taking up any website development project which helps us in keeping the track of the website’s progress and achieving the milestones as per our predefined check-list!
If you like how we work, get in touchand discuss how we can improve your business. We look forward to hearing you.
