The Skill of creating good presentation of web content is keeping focused on an easy to use and understandable site for your visitor. The intent of your web design is to create a collection of electronic documents and applications that present your content and interactive features in a compelling way. Before you hire a designer, check out their design process. You may also want to read our section on "How to Hire a Designer".
There is an art to creating a great website as well hiring the right design firm for the job. Here are the 8 steps to achieve both.
Step 1: The Three Stage Process
The entire design process uses three stages. These stages are preliminary design, beta site testing, and final construction. Each stage builds on the one before to make deeper consecutive refinements in the design process. This building up of stages cerates an order to guide you through a series of decisions that will make the best product possible.
Preliminary Design Stage
The preliminary design stage is the first of three phases in our process. Here we design a number of candidate alternative designs for you to choose from. As we pick the best design, we also refine the best design to answer many questions.
How many pages are on your site? What are the main goals the the site is trying to achieve? What will your navigation look like in terms of making a clear simple process for your visitors to find your key information? What is you brand trying to say? How do you distinguish yourself from your competition? How well do the preliminary design models (mock-ups / wire frames) fit the purpose of the your site?
Beta Site Design Phase
The beta phase is the second of three phases. It is the stage between the preliminary design and final site construction, in which feasibility is reviewed and technology is tested by you, your team, and us on a private server. Here we make sure to test that we are achieving the goals we laid out in the preliminary design phase by inspecting working pages on a private website to see how they look and feel. We refine our content. We revise graphics and navigation if necessary.
Final Site Construction
The final phase is the third of three phases. Here we construct the final HTML, CSS structure and content to be used on your server. The actual website that has been finalized in the previous phase is transferred and tested on your server.
Step 2: Tools for Collaboration
The design intent of collaborative tools is to transform the way documents and rich media are shared in order to enable more effective team collaboration. Our solution is to give every client their own client website where designs, color palettes, design decisions, and key emails are kept. By keeping these in a central place, all team members have constant access to the current state of the project. This eliminates confusing email cycles, having team members be left out of emails, and gives everyone a clear snapshot of the current state of the project.
One of the main questions we ask is "Who are you talking to"? In other words who is site intended for? What is the demographic? What will resonate with them the most? There are several things that a high-quality design should have:
* Balance.
Balance refers to the equal distribution of the heavy and the light elements on a single page.
* Unity.
Unity keeps all of the similar elements in the website alike and those that are diverse further apart; everything should be pulled into one integrated whole.
* Rhythm.
Also known as repetition, rhythm brings internal consistency into your web design.
Also, information overload can be a big website design problem. Good design says “less is more”. Trying to stuff all elements into one page is a recipe for disaster. We keep it simple. Clean. Easy to understand. This is an art to do it well.
Step 4: Good CSS Structure
CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content.
Step 5: Well Written, Interesting Content
Start your copy writing process for a particular page with good title. The art of writing a good web page title is similar to the art of writing a good Twitter tweet headline. Your headlines must:
1. Be USEFUL to the reader,
2. Provide him with a sense of URGENCY,
3. Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE; and
4. Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way.
Also think about the flow of your content from one page to another. Remember that you are trying to achieve a goal. The user should be lead to that goal. That's where a conversion funnel comes in. A conversion funnel is a term describing the track a consumer takes while visiting a website. Internet marketing tools such as Google Analytics and have made it possible to track visitors on websites. , You can view the exact path of each consumer. You can increase the effectiveness of your website by monitoring this funnel, enabling you to improve the efficiency of your web marketing campaign.
Web pages should have interesting themes and titles.
Step 6: Standards Compliant
Web standards is a general term for standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. The term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods. Your website will be fully standards compliant and have a very strong separation of the actual HTML content and with the styling of the page. This allows search engines and even cell phones to make more sense of your web pages.
Step 7: Optimization
Website optimization is another crucial factor that must be taken into consideration when professionally designing a website. Website optimization includes:
* Image optimization. Next to audio and video, images can severely compromise the speed in which your website loads. Always compress your images using Photoshop or your favorite image compression utility. By compressing images, you decrease the size of a file which allows a web page to load quicker which ultimately decreases the chance that your visitor will leave your website due to long load times.
* Audio/Video optimization. Another major annoyance which screams “unprofessional” is having enormous video and audio files embedded in your web pages. Try to use Flash Video (.flv) compression for your video files and (.mp3) compression for your audio files. Not only are the file sizes smaller than using (.avi) or (.mpg) for video or (.wav) for audio, but the video/audio loads faster which means other elements on your web page will load faster, too.
Step 8: Search Engine Optimization Friendly
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. We will help you set-up your strategy so that people and search engines a like will find you and understand your product or service.
