Whether you are planning on designing your very own website or you are a seasoned web development professional looking to design for the first time, you must understand the purpose and use of your website design. If this step isn’t taken, you will end up with a mediocre website that does not communicate well with your target audience. At Sayenko Design, we want to make sure you meet the goals of your audience while showcasing an aesthetically pleasing website design customized to your taste. It is crucial to understand the process before getting your hands dirty in code and design.
Below are questions to take you through the process of strategic web design.
Objective:
- Before you start designing any page, what is going to be the most important feature? Is it going to be a shopping cart? Your Blog? Your Image Portfolio? Just think for a moment on what you want users to do on your website. Some things to think about: imagery, usability, information, purchasing of products.
- Is the website going to need constant updates, such as text and graphics or a blog? Or is the site just going to be static with a few updates here and there?
- Will you be needing control of your content and have users access it? This is usually in a form of a user login on a website, with a backend database (usually used for news based websites, hospitals, clinics, services based sites)
- This is a critical one that many don’t think about. How can your site generate new users or clients, think marketing on social media sites such as twitter (we have a few great articles on Twitter I suggest checking out), facebook, and youtube to name a few. You want to get your name out to as many people as possible, social media sites are great for that. Also creating social videos are a great marketing tool and usually much more interesting to people to view then to read a four page article.
You are always looking to generate new users on your site, this should always be the end goal for any site. The next step is finding ways to keep existing users/clients coming back to your site. Think about marketing – promotional giveaways, a newsletter sign up, or an interesting blog.
Are you planning on generating revenue? If so what is the process from coming to the home page to the end result of purchasing a product or services?
Content
- What is the specific services you will be offering on your site? Is it a personal site? Or a business?
- If you are providing a service, how do you see the process flow from providing information to your viewer to the viewer purchasing your service?
- Do you send out any marketing material or information to your clients? This helps with keeping people interested and involved with your services. Things such as HTML newsletters, flyer’s, blog posts, social video. The end goal is engaging in your customers and giving them something valuable.
- What types of marketing or informational materials do you send to your clients to keep them involved with your business and services?
You should have most of your content laid out before you start on any design, or at least have a good idea of your content.
Web Design
You might have thought this should have been first. However, this is usually the last thing that brings all the elements together, as your not just building a pretty website, but rather a strategic one that understands the user, engages, and reacts. Think of the design as your overall picture in terms of how you want it to feel and look.
- Think of the “feel” of the site, the presence, what mood are you trying to convey when a user views your website. Is your site going to be simple and clean? A high-tech sophisticated look? A fun site that might be whimsical?
- A color scheme is very important to the mood of the website. What color scheme do you envision? What sort of feel or mood are you trying to convey? Why? Is it going to be cool vs. warm, black and white, brights, pastel, organic, skin-tones, earth-tones.
- Do you already have a logo, or are you looking to create your branding from the ground up?
This is the journey we take all our clients through to get a better grasp of their end goal and to have a website that is strategic in its web design. After going through these steps you will have a good feel of what you will want your website to do and feel. We encourage everyone to go through the steps carefully while really thinking about the process, as design is as much about the process as it is about design. Remember design is about visual communication. You want to communicate with the user – not just making a pretty graphic but a graphic design that works strategically.
