The Design Process - Planning

Once you get a website design request, you may be ready to jump right into designing the site. Wait! The firs step before designing a successful website is collecting as much information as you can from your client. You don’ t just start designing and hope it works out. Instead, you find out many things about the client, website, and their goals.

 

Designer’s have many different ways of going about this first step. I have found the most popular and effective choice to be a “creative brief.” This is a list of questions you send to the client to get a better understanding of what they are looking for in this new site design. There are many factors to consider in this design brief. Some important ones include

• The purpose of the site
• The target audience
• Special features (such as javascript navigation effects and flash areas)
• Budget
• Target Completion date

Below are two guides I found very helpful in writing a creative brief.

• Smiley Cat
• Freelance Switch

Another important part in planning is to create a “site map.” Not only will this help viewers upon completion of the website, but it will also help in creating design aspects like navigation and then adding the content to the pages. Site mapping doesn’t simply involve listing all the pages the final website will include. It is important to show the hierarchy of pages. To give an example, you may have two pages; the “Home” page and the “About” page which will have the subpages “Our Mission” and “Contact” under it. This sometimes involves a lot of though to complete. Work with the client on this one and give your input to the organization of the pages.

There are various other steps you can take while planning that will make the rest of the process easier, but some people wait to complete them at a later point. I would highly recommend double-checking the host and domain are locked in. This is usually done by the client but make sure so that you don’t have to go back and make simple changes later on.

Make sure you have a solid understanding of what the website is going to entail. Ensuring this will make the rest of the process go as smooth as possible!

Now get ready to start designing!!!