When you talk about creating a website, you need to follow some specific steps especially if you are among the novices and designing an all together a new site. These steps would act like good guidelines, which can help you work in a right way by keeping the forgetfulness to the least. Though you will see every web designer having its own unique components of designing a site, however, the fundamental things remains the same, which include research, planning, designing, coding, etc. So, if you are keen to design a new site, make sure you follow the given steps as under. Let’s check them out:
Research and plan
Research could be called as the basic step, which you need to do before creating your site. Some portion of it would comprise of understanding the needs of the clients and identify with their specific industry requirements. Once you meet your client, you could discuss a couple of things including the target audience, objective, budget, deadline etc. This will further demand you to carry a good market research. Once you are able to understand the project with a good research it’s time to plan things accordingly. This will include the kind of web interface you are trying to adopt for your site along with content. At the end, it’s the content, which will drive your web design, if you are designing a news site; it will follow a different planning, whereas plainly designing the site for any small enterprise would follow another.
The technical requirements
Before you head to design your website, you need to decide upon your project’s technical requirements. Some of the decisions would simply affect the site’s budget, time duration and in some cases even the overall look and feel of any site. You could have different options, which you need to check as per your web site design project requirements. This could include using HTML, which could be simple to use but comes with little amount of flexibility. The other thing you need is a CMS (content management system), which is a must in any website as it helps in putting fresh and updated content on a regular basis by the site owner. You could design these systems from scratch; however, if you are working on platforms like WordPress or Blogger, you get a readymade content management system for free. The next thing you need to decide is the use of Flash wherein you use rich multimedia effects. Though the sites developed in Flash could be complex and time consuming but at the same time could be rewarding and doesn’t require coding.
Create Wireframes
The next step is to create wireframes, which are actually simple line drawings required for your website layout. It helps the designers and even the website owner to focus over the placement of elements instead of things like type and color. This is really required and plays a key role in understanding which content requires better focus and attention along with its space requirements over the pages. Hence with a wireframe, you would remain focused without being distracted by the other elements like visuals or some other thing over your website.
Start designing the site
Once your client has approved the wireframes the next step is to start designing the website. Adobe Photoshop could be called as the basic tool for creating your initial designs. You must focus over your site design in order to present the site content, whereas the flashy designs and the animations do have their own place but they shouldn’t overshadow what the users are trying to look for. By having a consistent navigation, you could help the visitors find all your main content areas whereas by using clean types, which is more seen over the text based sites will help the readers to come back. Before you start getting the actual content of your site project, you can add filler stuff to see things how it goes.
Building up the web pages
When your designs are approved, you now need to convert the mockups into the actual web pages, which have to be coded in HTML and CSS. The experienced designers generally take care of the coding part, whereas other designers would focus over the design aspects by working closely along with the developer thus bringing back the site into life. If this is the case, you need to be involved with the website developer from the very first day so that your design goes at par as per the expectations of your client and you embark with effective web layout and the features. Adobe Dreamweaver could help you in turning the mockup into working pages with the help of drag and drop feature and buttons, which will help in adding images and links. In this way, building up the entire required web pages, you end up developing the website by adding the CMS, putting the required content, adding the elements of search engine optimization, etc.
Final word
Developing a website need a number of steps, which you are supposed to first know and follow them to embark with quality site. The above steps would help you in coming up with the best website designs as per your client’s requirements.
About The Author – Margaret is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes to Next Financial Group
