A successful website design project is a collaboration between you and the web designer or agency that you’re working with. It’s important to be present in the design process, providing feedback and asking questions to ensure you know what’s going on.
The key to defining a successful website design is a clear understanding of your company or organization’s goals for the project.
It’s possible that you’ve already had an experience creating a website with an agency or solo web designer that didn’t have a successful outcome or wasn’t an enjoyable experience. This does happen sometimes and it’s usually down to one (or both) parties not delivering what was needed to push a great project over the line. This is why it’s important to take time at the beginning of a project to consider your role in the process and what you need from your web designer.
Knowing what you want your site to look like and how it should function is crucial as this will dictate both the technical solution (involving things like CMS) as well as the visual look and feel (colours, brand elements etc.) of your web design project
Website Design Process – Planning for success
Goals:
It’s important to establish goals for your new website so that you can measure the success of your project as you move forward. These goals should be SMART, which means that they are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.
For the website project itself, this would typically be that the website is delivered on time, for an agreed level of investment and with all agreed functionality in place.
Identify pain points:
Before a project kicks off, you should identify the potential issues that could arise that will make or break the project. These are often things like resources, budgets or timescales. By identifying this in the planning phase, it will give you and your team a chance to address them before they become critical to the development process. Scope creep is one example of this; if it’s introducing a new element to the project that wasn’t originally planned then it can potentially cause problems later.
Website Requirements:
The very start of a website project is the time to think about your needs and requirements.
Your requirements could focus around specific features you wish to incorporate, such as the ability for customers to purchase your products/services online, or a Live Chat option, so your customers can get quick answers from you or your team.
Your requirements also need to cover things like the visual look and feel of your site. Whilst these are sometimes taken care of during an initial design meeting, it’s worth making notes about the specifics that you want your final product to have.
A great way to ensure your requirements are covered is by having a meeting with your designer to go through them in detail one by one. Whether it’s writing notes and bullet points or a full, detailed brief, it will help bring clarity and keep everyone on track as you move through the process together.
Here are a few examples of requirements that you might want to include in the development process:
Systems & Features
- WordPress Content Management System
- E-commerce functionality
- Booking funcitoanlity
- Forms
- Calculators
Marketing
- CRM Integration
- Marketing automation integration
- Social sharing
- Newsletter signup or subscription
Tracking & Analytics
- Google Analytics incorporated
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
- Facebook Pixel
- LinkedIn Pixel
- Bing Analytics
Website project investment:
Every website project needs a budget. Try not to look at it as a “budget” or a “price” but as an investment in your business. This might feel like marketing talk, but in truth, it’s actually just a mindset shift. By investing in the right resources in your project, you are ensuring that you’re creating a platform for your business to succeed.
You need to consider how much you want to invest in terms of time and money. Through the initial stage of the design process, your designer will conduct research and compile information about how the visual design of the site will look, how the user interface might look and how the users will interact with it. This could take a few hours or weeks; it depends on the scope of what you want to achieve with it.
Establish that you’re working with the right people:
It’s essential to get the right people involved from start to finish. Your development team is going to make or break the website design process, and it’s vital that you get someone who will look at things objectively and understand the scope of the work ahead of them.
Most agencies will have a team leader who will be able to help give direction and keep everyone on track. With your design team, you need to clearly outline what your needs are and how they can best be met. If there are any areas that they can’t quite grasp, consider a second or third opinion from another source.
Project planning meetings should take place early on in a project. This allows the client, design team, development team and agency personnel time to properly plan, discuss issues as they arise, and establish budgets upfront so everyone is on the same page.
Project meeting strategies:
There are several techniques that can be used to help make the most of a project meeting. For instance, one technique for you to use is ‘take-home’ meetings. This is where you take home notes from the project meeting so that you can refresh your memory later on and discuss them again with your designer/agency. This helps in ensuring you understand everything that has been discussed and what will be included in the final design/delivery process. The importance of take-home notes cannot be understated; they’re a fundamental part of any project plan because they help establish consistency throughout the entire design process.
Content:
The content on your website is one of the most important elements. Great copy has the power to draw people into your site, whilst poor sentence construction, bad grammar and spelling mistakes can repel users almost instantly and diminish user experience. It also helps with ranking in search engines which helps to drive traffic to your site.
Wherever possible, you should work with an experienced copywriter to ensure that you have great copy on your website. It’s true to say that investing in a great copywriter tends to pay for itself many times over. If you do have the opportunity to include it as part of your budget, this can be a great way to make sure you have great content on your site. This is also relevant for blog posts, creating content on a regular basis not only helps educate your audience but will also help increase your site ranking in search engines.
Knowing your audience:
It’s really important to know who you are trying to attract to your website. You should work with the designer and copywriter to get a clear understanding of what kind of people will visit your site, how they use the internet and how they expect websites to function on mobile devices. This will help everyone involved understand what kinds of issues may require attention in the design/content phases of development.
Pulling it all together at the end of the day:
The final result? There are many ways to achieve a great website design, whether it’s with the assistance of a professional or by following the above steps. The important thing is to work with the right people, focus on content and put your best foot forward. At any stage in development, you can check back on your visual style and make adjustments to ensure you’re achieving your goals. You will also want to check back from time to time to see how well your website is performing so that you can make improvements along the way if required.
Your next website project could be the very first one for your new business, or it could be the latest re-design in a line of successful (or unsuccessful) websites that you’ve had previously. The future of your businesses success depends on websites, so you must ensure that the websites you are creating are one-of-a-kind, secure and engaging.
Don’t let another web development project go down the drain. Upgrade to the next level of website development with Think Forward today.
