As a web designer, your primary goal is to use the simplest but effective process that saves both time and money. The idea is to serve as many clients as possible while maintaining high levels of good workmanship in everything you do.
In this post, we walk you through a simple checklist for efficient web design process when handling your client projects.
So, let’s dive right into it:
Build a client-driven brief
The direction that any web design project takes must lead to a projected result. You want it to satisfy the expectations of both you as the designer and the client.
An effective way to achieve this objective is to establish a client brief. Below are quick questions you need to ask your clients to develop an effective brief:
What does your company do?
This will help you understand what visitors consider most valuable in the website.
Who is your target market?
This defines the ideal customer persona based on aspects like gender, age, nationality, needs, etc.
Who are your competitors?
Helps you design a functional website with features that give it an edge over the competition.
Establishing a technical brief
Most typical web design project will have a few technical bits that demand more attention and expertise. Having a special brief for these processes helps you with proper project planning including setting realistic delivery timelines.
Begin by engaging all your partners who may include the developers, copywriters and SEO strategists. At the same time, take into consideration aspects like CMS, programming languages, content, and site structure.
Designing the website
After you have developed your project’s blueprint, this next phase now focuses on the actual web design. Here, your guiding resources are the branding elements that go into the website. These include the preferred color schemes, logos, imagery, font styles, among others.
Further, this phase involves working closely with the development team to integrate the technical bits into the website. To nail it, check the following:
- There’s a uniform branding style across the website for a consistent brand identity.
- Designer prototypes are working towards the projected result.
- There’s a consistent naming convention for the design assets to accelerate the design process.
Testing the design
Upon completing the development phase, your next phase involves testing the suggested designs. It can take longer as your team develops iterations to lead the project towards the desired result.
During this phase, all stakeholders need to work as a team which makes having a communication brief critical. The idea is to ensure that the designers, developers, and clients are on the same page before the big launch.
Website launch and maintenance
Arriving in this phase means you have the ideal website ready to launch and go public. A few things to examine carefully before launching include:
- Responsiveness of the website on operating systems and devices likely to use it.
- Working pages, links, plugins, and other web elements.
- Check content for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, flow, and comprehension by the target market.
If all is well, go ahead and launch it. While at it, expect to get feedback from users which takes us to the final part; maintaining the website.
Typical maintenance work involves:
- Adding and testing new features or web elements
- Regular testing and fixing any technical problems that arise
- Adding new content or updating existing one
- Collecting user feedback and applying necessary adjustments on demand.
Are you feeling ready to go ahead with your next project after reading this? We’d like to hear your feedback.
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