6 Steps to Website Design.

Each design process must start with the specification and assessment of all works. Without well-defined needs, even the best graphic designer in the world won’t guess what the customer meant by asking for a “simple website”.

Especially when it comes to the graphic design – a well-filled brief supplemented with your own thoughts will be worth the weight of gold. We realize that conveying what one sees (or doesn’t see…🙂) in one’s imagination can be difficult to express. However, we believe that an honest conversation with an experienced graphic designer may dispel many doubts, systematize and arrange the project so that it is functional and fully corresponds to the client’s ideas. Therefore, it is worth making an appointment with the graphics department and just tell about your idea.

It often happens that the client doesn’t have a complete idea of what a given project may ultimately look like. Don’t feel discouraged – we, as graphic designers are able to talk with you in a way that enables us to learn as much as possible and create a suitable layout for a given industry.

A well-written brief also has another advantage – in case we forget about an element or functionality during implementation, we can always return to it and verify the guidelines for the project.

Discussing the brief, we can immediately continue and create a comprehensive information architecture and menu structure with the client. This is a good solution, especially if our client is from another region or even a country. The more details we can record and specify right away, the easier and faster we will be able to put the finished site into use.

If all the customer’s needs have been written down and discussed, we can proceed to work. Usually within five to ten days, the graphic designer is able to send the first sketches, so-called mockups, to the customer for review.

With today’s technological possibilities, in the era of tools such as Adobe XD, Sketch or Figma, the project sent can be clickable and imitate all the functionalities and appearance of a finished website. This is a great convenience, especially when we are dealing with a customer who is not able to imagine certain elements and behaviours, such as hover or animation.

What’s important – it’s worth explaining why they should be used and what the mockups show. In the case of services, complex systems, the first mockups will be very simple, devoid of “tastes and effects”, which may discourage or even scare the customer. So you need to take care of a mutual understanding of the idea of mockups.

If all mockups and their functionalities are accepted by the customer, we can proceed to the actual design of the website, based on the developed style and solutions. This is usually done in stages: we design and submit a home page design to which the customer can submit changes and corrections. When it’s accepted, we create the rest of the (established at the beginning) subpages – usually this is done analogically, we use visually similar modules so that the whole site is consistent and corresponding. When the client receives a set of views, he reports final corrections. Afterwards, the final acceptance of the graphic design takes place. At this point, the role of a graphic designer somehow ends up.

At this stage, the graphic designer passes on the entire project and additional guidelines, which could not be included in the graphic files, to the programmer who encodes the page in the environment selected at the beginning. At this stage, the developer, step by step, sub-page by sub-page, implements the site, makes it start to live a real life.

The graphic designer in this phase may or may not (often this role is performed by the project manager himself) supervise the display of the coded project – mainly in terms of the size of individual elements or the display of individual versions on mobile devices.

Again – functional and correctness tests can be carried out by a project manager, graphic designer or a specially delegated tester whose task is to spot all inaccuracies and errors in the display of the page on all operating systems and mobile devices. It is logical that graphic issues (e.g. distance between the lines, typography or margins) should be verified by a graphic designer – who will know best whether the coded page is visually 1:1 consistent with the design accepted by the client.

The client receives a working link with a complete website, which he/she can also test and click on available devices. At this stage, there is no room for changes like “because I do not like this section, let’s change it” – we do not change the style, content layout or the sections themselves.

The customer may, of course, want to change the photographs used or replace the texts – after proper training, he/she can also expand the page with further subpages.

When the testing is finished and the whole is accepted, there are no obstacles to finally publish the page in the client’s domain.

Also at this point everything depends on the initial arrangements – on what hosting and on what domain the website will be located, who will be responsible for the transfer (usually the agency does this, but in some cases, the entire package containing the page that the company IT specialist uploads to the server is sent) and finally – who will be responsible for service and security updates.

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