If you think that web design is all about technical matters like code, structure, and content management, you will be mistaken. Great design is not just about how you integrate CTA or Social Media buttons on your site. Efficient web design is far more complex.
Perfectly designed websites offer much more to their visitors than just visual appearance. With the right placement of visuals, text, interactive segments, and many other details, websites help users to get to know your brand, product, or services you offer. Hence, all elements of your website need to work in harmony towards the common goal – provide more value to your website’s visitors and get more conversions. Most web development companies, like those who offer web design melbourne way, use a proven web design process, which is why they are able to create fantastic websites.
In today’s article, we are going to talk about eight proven phases of the web design process.
The Web Design Process In 8 Phases
- Set Your Goals
Set your goals
Defining your goals is the initial and most important phase of the web design process. It’s important to understand from sources like this one here about the fundamentals of making a website so that you do not bite off more than your website builders can handle. In case you don’t take this step seriously, the whole project may go in the wrong direction.
In this phase, the web development company needs to communicate with the client until they agree on the end goal of website development. There are numerous things to cover in this stage, and here are just some of them:
- Is the purpose of the website informative, transactional, or casual?
- What kind of people are expected to visit the website?
- What would the target audience like to see on your website?
- Who are the leading competitors, and how could you be different from them?
- What is your USP (unique selling point)?
- Defining Deadlines
Most clients want regular updates about the progress of their website design process. Furthermore, it is essential to follow up and manage countless micro tasks during web development.
This is the best web development companies underline the importance of making a detailed project plan which includes all micro activities and deadlines.
- Create Sitemap
The sitemap is the foundation of every professionally designed website. It is a blueprint of the website explaining the relationship between different pages such as Home Page, Category Pages, Product/Service Pages, About Us, etc. A sitemap is also very important in terms of SEO as it allows the adjustment of “link juice” flow. To learn more about how to create a sitemap, click here.
- It’s Time for Visual Design
Once the sitemap is ready, it is time to start with visual design. In this phase, web designers will try to convey your brand’s message and fundamental values visually. That’s why the primary focus is given to the UX and UI design of the site. It ensures that the site is interactive and also SEO friendly. You can click here to learn more about UI/UX designs.
- Create Valuable Content
Now that the sitemap and website templates are ready, it is time to create content!
Many web development companies believe that content is the most important part of a website. Its primary purposes are to drive engagement and keep visitors interested and boost the site’s visibility on search engines via SEO.
Content on almost every page of your website should be SEO-friendly, meaning every page should focus on about 1-2 keywords. You can find proper keywords using tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Uberssugest, and many others.
- It’s Testing Time
Website testing must not be ignored
Now that your website’s visual part and content are ready, it is time for testing. Every page needs to be tested to ensure that they are fully responsive (load quickly and adequately on various devices) and that all links are working.
The majority of errors encountered in this stage are usually the result of tiny coding mistakes and are very hard to find. However, it is better to spend additional time testing rather than to publish a broken website.
- Publish!
This is the favorite stage of the web development process for most web designers. The testing phase is over, and it is time to go live.
However, even if you encounter some issues during this phase, don’t worry. In most cases, those are going to be small errors. Keep in mind that launching a website does not mean that all the work is done! Every successful business should keep testing different features and content upgrades to improve its web presentation’s overall user experience.
- Website Maintenance
The website is a living entity that needs to be maintained in order to thrive. Maintenance of a website includes activities such as fixing broken links, updating content, and making changes to the backend.
Conclusion
As you can see, the web design process is quite complicated. If you want to have a professional-looking website with high conversion rates, we strongly suggest hiring one of the best web development companies in Dubai to design it for you. In most cases, great ROI is guaranteed.