Web design becomes an essential part of online industries since there are over 4.8 billion active users on the internet. A well-crafted alluring website can boost organic traffic, sales, and lead generation on your website. A well-designed website can offer much more than just beauty. It attracts visitors and helps them to understand the product and company with the help of encompassing visuals, text descriptions, and interactions. So, in this article, we have mentioned the six steps of the Web Design Process to understand the basics of web design.
With website-building tools, almost everybody can build a website easily. But the website design process has a lot more than just building a simple website. A web design process involves different disciplines and skills to maintain and develop the website. Different areas of the web design process include design, development, user experience and user interface design, testing, and launching. Precisely, it is the step-by-step process to build a fully functional live website.
Not just in web designing but in every aspect of digital marketing activity it is a must to find and set the activity goals or objectives. In the web designing process, the designer needs to set the initial and the end goals of the website design, usually when collaborating with the client, customers, or other stakeholders. You should write down a few goals and objectives before starting any new project. This will help your design to move in the right direction.
Exploring the Questions and Answers is the most important part of any web development process. It can only be done effectively when developers interact with clients directly. To achieve the goal while building the clients’ dream website, it is necessary for the developer to have answers to the following questions-
Most web designers mainly focus on style and design when it comes to building web design. It may influence the visitors but setting up goals and objectives will give a better understanding of requirements.
To achieve the goals more efficiently, these questions need to be well answered. If all these questions are not answered clearly, your whole project may go in the wrong direction. So, you need clear and well-defined answers to these questions. Before you move ahead with the project.
Before starting work any web designer collects as much information as possible about the client, his business, and preferences. The more information developers know, the better result they will be able to provide. Web designers conduct a thorough preparatory phase. It’s an analysis of why the client needs the site, what tasks it must perform: to represent the company on the Internet, or to sell goods and services, to be a quality advertisement for the business, or to be a start-up for a young firm. All this is specified with the customer.
He/ she should understand why they need a website, what it will help his/her company, and what it will not be able to cope with. Next, marketing analysis is made which includes an analysis of competitors, seasonality of the product, service, activity, and niche, the competitiveness of the offer, etc. The leads and tricks that will help attract the visitors’ interest are identified.
This is the second significant stage of the web design process. When all the information about the client’s preferences and his business is collected, it’s time to start generating ideas. Developers should always have more than one creative idea. After all, the more ideas — the more you can consider, propose and, if necessary, reduce.
After a phase of brainstorming, the client receives the first draft. Here they review, correct, and confirm the design. This process is also extremely important, and it takes much time because you don’t just have to send the client variants and wait until he/ she does everything. You have to bring the design to perfection when there are no more issues.
This step decides how your website will look like. The step includes the strategic placement of every design element to make your website more appealing to your target audience. Good web developers have the motives behind every web design decision. A professional web developer or designer always pays close attention to design and codes to see how a design will translate to code. Even if he is not doing the development himself, as a designer, it is also a good idea to invest in coding skills.
A wireframe with basic web page elements such as the navigation, header, widgets, etc.. is created for the website in this step. The wireframe is the inner structure of the website. The main objective of creating and following this wireframe is to make a website layout and understand how each function will embed into the website. Programs such as Photoshops can move the wireframe into more realistic mockups. The challenge for every good web design is balancing form and functions. And this can be done by using the information you gathered in the first step. It can give you the desired shape for your design.
Besides the wireframe, other important elements are created in this step as well. We have listed some of them below-
Creating design mockups makes a huge difference when it comes to website designing. Because you can test your website in a realistic manner with help of these mockups. And you can also gather stakeholders and design a perfect website. It is a must to design a website with interactive content. Hence, embedding animation elements like a cursor, buttons, and hover state effects can help to build interactive design mockups. Hence, these mockups let you enable the interactions that perform actions at a specific time or conditions. With these mockups, you can test almost every functionality of your website design at the early stage of development.
Creating a user interface (UI) is also a critical step, which includes content development, image, and animation integration. The UI is focused on the graphical and visual side of the website design. In UI following elements are included- Photo Theory, Graphic Design, Typography, Motion Graphics, Vector Manipulation.
On the other hand, User Experience (UX) is the behind-the-scenes of web design which includes the following elements- Usability Testing, Target User, Architecture, Design Interaction, Information, Content Strategy.
Developing visuals and functionals will allow you to stay ahead in the game. it will help you and your client to get a clear idea of what they can expect in the design of the website. For instance, It is easy to go from one window to another manually. However, explaining the entire design workflow, if they can only see the static pages without any visuals and functionalities is hard. especially if you are showing mockups to non-UX designers, such as individual clients or business stakeholders. It is also possible that clients don’t know about navigation flows or how these flows are supposed to look like. So, rather than just explaining them, you may want to demonstrate these flows.
The website design translates the code to make the website run in the development step. It is the most crucial and lengthy step. After all, development is not just an assembly job, it’s more than that. And in this step, your project begins to move rapidly towards the final goal of the website launch.
The development step can be divided into two-phase-
The front-end is a part of the website design in which you can see and interact with the website. Building the visual part from scratch comes under the front-end development. The front-end development is a must step of the web design process. It is about designing and crafting user experiences. The front-end development is done by using HTML, CSS, Bootstrap frameworks, JavaScript. It is hard compared to back-end development.
The back-end development is a backstage process that powers the logic and functionality of the entire website. This phase includes the following elements –
The process of Backend development is mainly focused on how the website will function. In the backend development, the necessary updates and changes are made on a regular basis to the website to run it smoothly. For this backend languages like PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Python, and SQL are needed. The language is chosen based on the requirements of the website.
Code implementation gives more room for customization and functionality. The developer or designer can recreate the wireframes with different codes. Adding UI changes and critiques on design functionality makes website style and motion. Optimizing the website code also helps in SEO because SEO rankings are determined by the overall performance of the website. For instance, CSS and JavaScript minification makes your website load faster.
CRM plugins such as Podio, Zoho, SharpSpring, and Salesforce are used to manage contacts easily on a day-to-day basis. Since they can help the overall information architecture of the website, they are used widely.
It is important to create each field of content in the database and custom fields to add things like images and text in the content management systems.
For WordPress developers, the website development steps include-
Installation of WordPress on localhost.
Installation of starter WordPress themes.
Installing a WordPress backup plugin to easily revert file changes and move the site to the live domain for lunch while developing the design.
Using the mockup on the live site.
Once the prototype website has all visuals and content, you can start testing it. You need to test each page of the website to make sure all websites load properly on all devices and there are no broken links on the page. Small coding mistakes are often painful and hard to find and fix. So, it’s better to find and fix them in this step rather than on a live site. Before launching the website, the quality analysis team checks and tests the complete flow of the website. They check page organization to website structure to make sure everything is well aligned or not. After finishing the testing of the website, experts in graphic design schedule a meeting with the stakeholders or client and explain every detail. The stakeholders or Clients must learn how to add content, images, and functions to the website.
You should also have one last look at the contents descriptions and meta titles. A small mistake like the order of the words in the meta title can also affect the website’s performance. Here are a few things you should check before launching your website.
There are also website testing tools such as W3C Link Checker, SEO Spider are there that can help you to test your website.
Once your prototype passes all the testing and approvals, then you can launch your website on a live server. It is the most awaited part of the website design process. Don’t start celebrating yet. Since there are a lot of steps involved in the website launching, there is a chance that some elements need to be optimized or fixed. So, it’s better to have a checklist to make sure you have done all the checks and optimization. Web design is an ongoing process that requires regular updates and maintenance.
Even after the website launch, there is still a lot of work to do. You need to monitor the website server regularly. Check the performance, traffic data, operation, and security of the server. If a web server overloads with traffic and requires higher server configurations, you need to start looking for better alternatives. A key thing to remember about this step is that the launch doesn’t mean the process is over. The beauty of this process is that it’s never over. Once your website goes live, you can regularly add updates, monitor analytics, and run user testing on new features and content.
The web design process is an endless process. Besides these fundamental steps, there are also many things involved in this process. A good web design is all about finding the right balance between design form and functions. Using the right elements such as fonts, colors, and design layouts can give your website the desired look. However, do not forget about users’ needs and their experience on your website.
I hope this article helps you to understand the basis of the web design process. If you have any queries regarding this article, you can ask me in the comment section below.
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