Creating a website and releasing it to the world is no easy feat. In order to progress, you must solve a number of problems and answer a number of questions. It can be really helpful to have a tried-and-true web design process that covers all of that.
Hundreds of client sites and dozens of Brainstorm Force own sites have been developed since 2009. In that time, we’ve refined our design process to the point where we can breeze through a project while simultaneously completing its most important steps.
This is perfect for you if you’re a web developer working on client sites or a company owner attempting to launch your own website. We have built 525+ Website Designers Toronto using this tried-and-true 7-step process:
Objective Establishment
This may come across as trite, but hear me out; what I’m about to say is effective:
Make a plan
For your websites, you need to establish a goal.
Without a doubt, objectives are effective. Several factors contribute to that:
a) Having a target in mind helps to maintain concentration.
When creating a website, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest features. There is always room for improvement; there’s always an additional effect, picture, slider, feature, etc. will you?
No amount of research can help you decide whether something belongs on the site if you aren’t clear on its principal purpose.
If you have clear objectives, you can always determine if a feature is suitable for the site.
Establishing a Name and Logo
Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of developing a website is collaborating on the various components that make up your brand.
Choosing a name, playing around with fonts and color schemes, and—most importantly—having a logo made is something that everyone enjoys. In the morning, there’s nothing better than perusing logos, though I may be going a bit crazy here…
- Alright, let’s make things a little more organized:
- Get the domain and name straight first.
- Everything else is largely dictated by your domain name.
Avoid having a domain name that is confusingly different from the name of your product or company.
If you own a business, you shouldn’t have to settle for an obscure TLD (domain extension) simply to use it online.
Avoid choosing a domain name that could be easily confused. Take rosas. café as an example, as opposed to rosascafe.com. Yes, both of those URLs do in fact lead to separate cafes, but they are already online.
The first step in finding the perfect domain name is to jot down every possible name that comes to mind.
You can use Lean Domain Search, which will also provide other domain suggestions when you add different words to your seed phrase, or GoDaddy, which offers a wide variety of top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the standard.com, to see if any of these names are available.
By the way, if you’re thinking about it, you can use modern top-level domains (TLDs) like. blog,. city,. art,. design, or. store if they suit your site’s purpose.
Do not hesitate to register a domain name that catches your eye. Additionally, there is no longer any need to acquire SITE.net, SITE.org, etc., since it is no longer crucial to possess every conceivable TLD version of your domain.
Website Content
The content of a website is typically neglected until last. Clearly, this is a bad choice.
The subsequent steps of web design will be more challenging if you do not develop the textual content of your pages early on.
It will be considerably more difficult to organize the design and guarantee that everything will fit without well-defined content. A lot of what you’re doing is what’s called “thin air design”—planning without any actual facts to back it up. A design that is aesthetically pleasing but entirely unpractical is the result of this process.
Website Organization
The structure of your website encompasses more than simply the content of individual web pages. This is all about the interconnections between those pages and how they lead the visitor to their desired destination.
To sum up, consider UX (user experience). To be more precise, what do you hope people will be able to accomplish while they are on your site? In what ways do you hope to enrich their lives?
While discussing user experience, it’s important to keep in mind that your goals and the goals of your visitors may differ.
Pick up where you left off by returning to the site’s original purpose. The foundation of the site will be built by you, and you will constantly return to that objective. Ask yourself, “Is the structure of that site conducive to my goals?”
Create a mockup
You can visualize your design in a mockup. It’s a stepping stone between staring at a blank screen and the finished product.
If you use a mockup instead of immediately diving into your preferred page builder, you can save time and effort while still getting a good look at the overall design.
This way, you can check that your page structures adhere to best practices and that your objectives are adequately addressed. By making the mockup, you’re laying the groundwork for the design that will follow.
That way, you can ease into the design process rather than diving headfirst into the details. If you did that, you risk losing sight of the forest for the trees as you obsess over the finer points of each design element, rather than seeing the forest for the trees in terms of how they contribute to your overall objectives.
Create and Establish
At long last, we can start constructing websites!
Everything up to this point has essentially laid the groundwork for what’s to come. Goals are important to you. Your target demographic is clear to you. I can tell you who the rivals are. Your navigation structure and mockups are prepared. Branding is complete with your logo, color palette, and identity. Now is the time to make these things happen!
- The seventh step is to go live.
- Now is the moment to launch your site to the world!
Installing your site on your final production server is the first and most tedious step. If you haven’t already, make sure to connect the domain name.
To go from local development to production, you can utilize a plugin such as Duplicator. When it comes to migration, some hosts even provide their own services or suggest certain plugins. You should follow those suggestions to the letter. Consult the documentation provided by your host.
