Web Design Process

The success of any website design and development process depends entirely on clear communication between the client (you) and your design/development company. Any web design company that’s been around for awhile understands this and should have transparent goals, milestones and schedules to share with you after they are presented with your site specifications or “specs”. Before engaging with a website design/development company, however, it is a good idea to do some work internally.

Planning Your Web Site

Every project needs a plan. This is a good time to invite input from your company’s principles and advisers and — few companies ever think to do this — representative clients or customers.

Here are some important considerations during the website planning process:

• Set a goal for the site. You might be surprised at how challenging this can be. Include a few concrete objectives.
• Identify your audience and geography. Is your product or service aimed at elderly women or teenagers? Do you plan to ship your widgets worldwide, or are you restricting shipping to within 50 miles of your warehouse?
• List the strategies you plan to use to attract your customers and keep them coming back. Will you be doing cross-selling, surveys, newsletters, volume discounts, or viral marketing?
• Who will maintain your site? Can updates be done by you or will you need a full-time webmaster? Does this person have to take photos, compose text, adjust code or communicate with the west hosting service?
• Prepare a page breakdown. Give the developer the scope of the project. This part of your plan is important to avoid a phenomenon called “scope creep,” in which last-minute ideas are added until the project becomes so large and expensive that it loses its focus or goes way over budget.
• Identify the developer(s) and all personnel needed to support the web site.
• Prepare a budget that outlines all development and maintenance costs.
• Outline a schedule. Communicate deadlines to all the stakeholders.

Estimating the Costs of Developing Your Web Site

Once you have a plan, you have the specs you’ll need to get an estimate for the costs of your site. You’ll have no trouble finding a wide range of prices from various vendors.

Several vendors have templates into which they can put your content. The look and feel of the site may be generic, and you’ll have little control over the placement of objects on the page. Customization will usually require extra costs.

Designing and Producing a Web Site

If you have experience with web site production, you don’t need a list of what you have to do to produce a web site. If you don’t, this is a list of the information your developer will need from you in order to design produce a site for you:

• Your in-house liaison or project manager.
• Your subject matter expert(s) or SMEs. That is, when the time has come to enter the content, who will do the writing or specify the information? Who will answer questions about placement, errors or function? Who will approve the final version?
• The technical features you’ll need, such as a domain name, security, disk space, bandwidth, e-mail, blogs, forums, a customer help desk, database management, search functions, video, audio and many others.
• Basic site architecture requirements to guide the design of the site’s navigation, outside links and other features that make the site easy to use. This includes access by the visually impaired through their text readers.
• The graphics, photographs, video files and/or audio files that will be used in the site.
• Specific fields needed for any database records. For example, if you sell shoes, you’ll need basics for each catalog entry: a photograph of the shoe style, its price, sizes, a text description, etc. But you also have to decide whether you’ll show a picture of a brown shoe and let the customer pick a color or whether you want a picture of the shoe in each color (brown, tan, black and navy).
• Your policies such as privacy, security, returns and agreements. If your business is recruiting writers, for example, you’ll need a statement about copyright and ownership of creative works.

Launching Your New Web Site

Before your project is finished, you’ll have to make sure your web site does all that you intended it to do. Of course, you’ll navigate through the site, checking that everything works well, but the site isn’t for your use: it’s for your customers. Your best approach is to recruit several potential customers or clients and provide them with a list of questions such as:

• Did all the links work properly?
• Did you have a sense that the site was written for you — your sex, your age group?
• Was it easy to use?
• Did you have to wait for any pages to load?
• Does any part of the site look crowded or confusing?
• Did you have any navigation problems? Could you tell where you were at any given time?
• Was the text easy to read? Did the information flow well?
• Were you satisfied when you placed an order or did you have to compromise?

In addition to the customer test, someone in-house should do a final check of all text, pictures, links, video and audio. Be sure you have access to any analytic information your developer places on the site, so you can measure your traffic. After this is installed and the testing is complete, your site is ready to launch!