In this video, we’re going to take a look at the design process our company uses to ensure our client’s website comes out looking great & is set up to support their marketing & sales goals. By following this design process, we are able to consistently produce great-looking websites for our clients.
Whether you are here because you are designing a website yourself or hiring an agency or freelancer to do it for your company, a proper design process is essential to ensure that your website comes out looking great in a quick timeframe.
So if you’re considering a web design project, this video will help you see what a smart design process looks like. Watching will give you the insights you need to see if potential project partners have a well-thought-out design process that will ensure your project ends up successful.
Below is an outline of the key topics discussed in the video.
UX Design
- UX Design is about creating “version 1” of the website. Here, we are mostly concentrating on the layout & structure of the website from a high level, and not design details such as colors and fonts (which come later).
- This is the blueprint of the website - and you should think about it as insurance for your project. We present these preliminary designs to our client before advancing to the next stage of producing more detailed designs. By getting their approval early, we can continue designing with more detail and don’t risk the stop & starts that plague many web design projects.
- The goal here is to put ourselves in the shoes of our future site visitors and think about what information we need to provide them to prove our client’s company can solve their problems. We want to think about telling a story and developing a thoughtful content structure that gives people helpful information depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
- By first focusing on the high-level layout and structure, we can ensure that the website is going to be engaging to visitors and have a solid conversion rate metric once live.
- This saves time over the long run because after that it is just focusing on populating the design with content and making it look visually appealing.
Content Development & Copywriting
- While the design is being worked on, content is being organized and created by various stakeholders. It is important to map out ahead of time what content will be needed and who will be responsible for completing it. This will avoid delays later on.
- This is one of the most important parts of the project. I tell all my clients a quote from the book “Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller that says “Pretty Websites do not sell things, words sell things.”
- This can make or break an entire project. The sales copywriting part determines if the website will sell, and the SEO part determines if the site will rank. Even if the website wins tons of design awards if it can’t sell and can’t rank the entire project is a failure.
- That’s why we recommend all of our clients hire a copywriter for their project who we will manage in-house. This will ensure the copy on the site is professionally written to support lead gen efforts & there are no delays (content is the area that is most likely to cause delays during the web design process)
UI Design
- Once we have agreed on a rough layout, the next step is to create a fully functional and detailed mockup that will show exactly what the core web pages will look like once live online
- Here, we are focused on adding colors, fonts, textures, shadows, images, videos, and writing the final copy. This is probably exactly what you think when it comes to “web design” - but as you can tell by now it's just one piece of the puzzle when designing a truly effective website.
- Something to note here is that it is not necessary to create final designs for every page the site will feature. Instead, it's a much better use of everyone's time & resources to simply focus on designing the core pages of the site. Then, during the development phase, our dev team can simply apply this design to the other pages during development.
Conclusion
I hope you find the content here helpful. If you have any questions or would like to discuss a project, feel free to book a strategy call with me.
