A well-planned, step-by-step website process is essential to ensure a professional and successful website. Design Grid’s 8-step website process is used for most of our web design projects, whether they are big or small, to ensure that the main focus is producing a high-quality and user-friendly website for you and your audience.
A well-designed website is so much more than just appearance. Your website is the first point of contact for customers. It assists people with understanding the business and its values and the products you sell through a combination of visual aspects, text and links. Therefore, all aspects of your website need to work together to provide a clear message and present key information to the customer. At Design Grid, our goal is to assist you in achieving this. From the initial consultation phase to the launch day, we maintain frequent contact with our clients providing regular updates to confirm you are 100% happy with your website as it happens in real-time.
8 Step Website Design Process.
Our step-by-step process is outlined below, and we confirm with you that you are fully satisfied before moving onto each stage:
- Strategy
- Quotation
- Discovery
- Look and feel
- development
- Test
- Change
- Launch
1) Strategy
We start with an initial consultation with you and discuss your strategy. The key to the success of any website is to find out what your needs are, the client base you want to reach, what is important to your company and what you are looking for. The more information you can provide, the better, as it allows us to tailor your website and its design to your specific needs.
Following the consultation, we will write up a proposal summarising the ideas discussed in the meeting, and at this point, we will also provide a time estimation for how long the work will take to complete. The time frame can vary depending on the type of website and any additional services.
2) Quotation
Once we have the right amount of detail and have confirmed the time frame needed for the design, we will provide you with a quotation based on an estimation of the number of hours and technical ability required.
3) Discovery
On approval of your quote, we’re in the discovery phase. We will send out a document for you to complete that provides us with further information and finer details, such as account details, logo, social media profiles, and a few questions on your competitors and what sites you might like or don’t like.
4) Look and Feel
From this, we work on the look and feel. We come up with a colour scheme for your site, typography and work through a User Interface/wireframe design/layout structure- developing a visual brand. If we are creating a logo for your business and webpage, it is at this point we will present some ideas for feedback and changes.
We encourage plenty of feedback to ensure you are 100% happy with the design concept that we present to you during this stage and to reduce any “back-and-forths” later which can cause delays to the process.
5) Development
Once we receive confirmation that you are happy with the design concept and visual brand idea provided, we head into the development stage!
Development includes building our design and either writing your content or receiving the final content from you. Content also includes any images with good image resolution, events, specific details, or testimonials you may want to include in your website.
When creating content for your webpage, we always keep in mind focus keywords for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The better your SEO at the beginning, the easier it will be for customers to find you through search engines.
6) Testing
We are now onto testing – our internal testing and the opportunity for your company to test. This will allow you to test the your website as a whole and imagine what it will feel like to prospective customers and the user experience they will have.
We recommend thoroughly testing each page to ensure that all links are working and how it loads on a web browser and a mobile device. Many people now view websites on their phones or devices, so always check to make sure you are happy with the responsive design!
To help you test your website, we will provide you with a document to add any defects or issues you’re experiencing.
Any issues in these areas will result from small coding errors – and no matter how small, we want to know so we can ensure the website is perfect on launch day. It’s better to find problems now and fix them, no matter how small, so your live website on launch day is perfect!
7) Change
Following the testing stage, we will make the changes that are needed from the document you’ve filled in. Once this has been completed, we will get you to review the changes to approve the website for launch.
8) Launch
Once any glitches or issues have been ironed out, it’s time for everyone’s favourite stage – website launch or go-live.
We will organise a launch date with you and discuss social media communication strategies – which platforms do you want to use to let your customers know you are launching your new website, and how? It’s crucial before your launch date to make your customer base aware that your new website will soon be online, so they can start browsing as soon as the website is live.
So now, it’s time to kick back, relax, open the bubbly and enjoy your new website!
Will my website need maintenance in the future?
It is important to bear in mind that web design is an ongoing process, so even after launch day, there may be some feedback from customers about your website, and you can tweak and improve your webpage in the future. You shouldn’t have any technical issues following the launch of your website as we do thorough checking and testing of the site. However, we all know how unpredictable technology can sometimes be, and if you are experiencing noticeable problems, we will be able to assist you. We want to ensure that your website continues to develop and improve as your business develops and improves!
And, whilst we endeavour to make your website easy for you to manage and maintain yourself, we understand that you may not have the time or want to do so. We do offer ongoing maintenance packages and security services for those who are interested in these ongoing services.
Are you ready to start?
For further information on how we can help you create your new website, visit Design Grid or contact us today!
