Newstricky| Websites are the face of businesses today. From small businesses to big enterprises, all have their existence on the internet in the form of a website. It is very important that the website has a unique appearance and appealing design.
Developers follow a number of different steps to develop a business website. A properly described website designing process necessitates about a detailed outline of the steps. Step-wise execution of a well-defined process reduces the time-consuming period required to complete the project.
Outstanding website design does not only have an appealing visual interface. This only cannot provide you with the best results. A well-structured strategic plan and development process will save you a lot of development time and effort while improving efficiency and ensuring that all the critical steps required for a successful design are covered. The website should be designed in such a way that it must fulfill the exact purpose for what it has been created.
Clearing all the doubts and giving you the best ideas, here we have a list of five things that you should never miss while designing a website.
Table of Contents
Define your Goals
The beginning of anything requires you to determine the project outline for better results. Similarly, start by determining a creative brief which, also defines the end goals of your project. Before starting the designing part of the website, a few questions are required to be answered:
- What is the objective of your website? What is the problem that you trying to solve?
- Who will be your target audience as the users of the website?
- What is the main focus of the website?
- Is your website information delivering platform? Or is it selling or generating the signup counts?
- Identify your competitors’ websites in the same niche. Also, gather information about their strength and weakness.
All these answers will help you to prepare a creative brief. A clear vision of the website designing process will motivate you to work on it. These questions will also encourage you to go for deep market research. You have to work on the benefits that your target audience will receive from your website.
Create an Effective Blueprint for the Strategy
In web development, scope creep is very common. The scope of the project mostly keeps expanding during the development phase, which might require expansion of the budget for the project and also the delay in delivering the project within the timeline.
Setting up timelines and planning strategically becomes critical to the long-term success of the project. In the planning phase, you need to finalize three important things:
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Use of programing language and technological tools
In this stage, the technical aspects related to the project need to be decided. Here, you need to select the technology stack to be used for development based on the website requirements.
For a website developed for information purpose, a CMS like WordPress would be a perfect fit. While, if you want to develop an e-commerce website, you will need a robust web development framework.
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Creating Wireframes and Sitemaps
Before you switch to the development phase, building a sitemap of the actual design will help you plan and develop an effective website.
A wireframe is the foundation of elegant website designing. It will provide a framework for the content elements and visual designs of the website.
The sitemaps and Wireframes are basic blueprints of the actual design of the website.
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Planning for the Content
Content is the foremost reason for the development of a website. Hence, content planning is another important aspect of the development plan. The content development should be planned with an effective SEO strategy so that the website can reach to the target audience. Well-Written content can boost the visibility of the website in search engine results.
Design and Development
The design elements of the website should be influenced by the current brand elements. The logo design, color scheme, font style, and other elements should be in accordance with the brand identity. In case it is a startup, the designer may get the freedom to choose but for established businesses, the design of the website should appear similar to the existing brand elements.
During the development process, the developer should focus on both back-end and front-end development while incorporating the content into the design of the website.
Testing
A very critical stage in the design process is testing and this needs to be done along with the development. It includes a number of different tests including testing for interface, functionality, usability, performance, compatibility, and security.
Complete testing should be done to ensure that the users do not face any kind of problem when they visit the website.
Launching and Maintenance
Launching the website involves transferring the website to the live server. The design and development team should find a balance between the functioning and formation of the website before it is ready for launch.
The task of the team does not end with the launch, there is another important milestone that the website needs to achieve. The site needs to be performing well all the time. And hence, there should be a maintenance phase to keep the website running successfully.
To develop a website successfully in a minimum amount of time, these five steps need to be followed. These five steps will help you design and develop an attractive and effective website in a limited period of time with high efficiency.
