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User Experience Design 8 min read
How to Create a Seamless Web Design and Development Workflow
- Propelrr
- 22 Feb 2022 9 min read
A well-designed website isn’t just a product of a good combination of aesthetics. There is always a systematic web design workflow that serves as the backbone for every successful website design project.
More than that, you know web designers always claim to do repetitive tasks with developing CSS and optimizing the website for a better user experience. This completion of the same monotonous tasks with just slightly modified steps can take too much of your effort and time.
Building and following a methodical workflow of web design and development, then, will surely help in speeding up your project’s timeline and in preparing your business for growth. Let us show you how to design one for your own organization, as a leading web design and development company.
Integral phases of a web design workflow
Web design surely does not just regard your website’s makeup and technical settings of your code, contents, and wireframes. Your web design is a great opportunity for your business to stand out from your competitors and make a good impression on your prospective customers.
Hence, having an efficient web design workflow will help you respond to your audience and customer needs strategically and effectively; helping you follow conversion-centered principles for better website conversions. This in-depth guide will provide you both the high-level and granular look into the web design workflow that you should learn and optimize for.
- Planning
- Implementation
- Quality Assurance
- Test and Launch
Planning
Preparing to build a systematic web design workflow process allows you to help predict, prevent, and manage potential risks and contingencies.
1. Kick-off meeting with your client and web developers
This is the first official forum to lay the foundation for the success of your website project. It gives you a chance to guarantee that you and your project team are on the same page with the project’s scope, budget, timeline, goals, and expectations.
The objectives of the project and its target audience must be well-discussed with this meeting to avoid conflicts on the actual web design process.
2. Setting your objectives for the website
In this primary step, you must pin down the objectives for the web design with the collaboration of the web designer or developer and the client. The following questions must be answered at this stage:
- Why do you want a website?
- What purpose will it serve you and your business?
Identifying your objectives is a high-priority task for any web design workflow process. Having answered these questions concisely will set off your website project in the right direction. Ensure that you know who is the site project’s target audience and grow a competitive working knowledge.
You can create a summary of your accurately recognized objectives which will thoroughly help your web design process to smoothly run through the right path of the process.
3. Discovery and research process
Before starting to develop your website, you need to conduct a customized discovery and research process.
Here are the steps you’ll need to do:
- Competitors check on their website. You need to review your competitors’ websites using UX Heuristic Analysis to recognize your project’s possible risks and opportunities. This also informs you about the latest web design and development trends in the market.
- Learn about the company and its products or services. Fully understanding the branding, its unique value propositions, as well business objectives is significant in creating the right design and layout that is highly appropriate for its products or services.
- Assess the needs of the user. You can conduct interviews or place website surveys to get the website visitors and potential customer insights and expectations from your web design.
- Develop audience personas based on the target audience. Doing so helps you identify and understand the end-users of your product. Seeing through their perspective will enable you to easily find a compromise between your target audience and your business.
- Define technical specifications and limitations. These are used to determine the budget and time for the total web design project.
Your research on these things will help you understand your client’s needs and goals, avoid congestions, and build a smooth-running web design workflow process.
4. Wireframing
What do you need when you want to visualize every part of your house? A blueprint.
And just like a house design blueprint, following an accurate user experience (UX) design blueprint optimizes a user’s journey to eventually lead to conversion.
Blueprint is a fundamental part of the process of building a house just as wireframes are important in creating a web design project.
Wireframing is a process for designing the structure of the website. It is a visual device that proposes any of your website’s page layout templates. This stage will save you time in the total web design process since you have settled on the layout of your ideas for the website before starting the actual web design.
Here are two types of wireframes you can work on:
- Lo-fi wireframes
Lo-fi or low-fidelity wireframes include the primary elements and visuals of the website but are not interactive. They provide the shell of the user interface (UI) and help your team to visualize early concepts and design assumptions of your web design project.
If you are looking for a wireframe that is convenient and easy to adjust with each design iteration, lo-fi wireframes are for you. They can be effortlessly iterated without interrupting the entire web design workflow process.
- Full mock-ups
You can use a full-mock up wireframe for a more in-depth visualization of your web design project. It is a static wireframe that uses more elaborate and visual UI details to show a realistic representation of the end-product of your web design project.
Wireframes work as a communication tool between the web developers and the client. Using it enables you to present your ideas and expectations more clearly.
5. Planning your site architecture
Site architecture is the way you present your website to the users. You must aim for a site structure that is easy to navigate and user-friendly.
Here are some tips for making a great site architecture:
- Make the visuals simple and scalable.
- Count your clicks. Make sure your site has at most three clicks to get from one page to another. Yes, not more than three clicks!
- Your homepage should link to all your website’s significant pages by incorporating it into your navigation bar.
- Use internal linking. This will present how your pages are connected to each other and increase the browsing time your visitors spend on your website.
6. Integrating the brand
A well-planned branding elevates your business to be recognized and gain loyalty.
Why do you need branding techniques to improve your sales and gain loyalty? Edelman Trust Statistics show that 81 percent of consumers buy products only from brands they trust. Having a cohesive brand raises your chances of being remembered by your clients.
Note that consistency is a must.
You need to choose the appropriate web design elements consistent with the business’ purpose, products or service, and nature of business.
Consider these elements to build a bold and memorable brand that users are sure to notice.
- Colors
Pick the right combination of colors to provide your audience perception of what your brand is all about. You can use the business logo to identify your dominant base color. Keep in mind that website color schemes are highly essential if you want to make it sharp and organized rather than confusing.
- Images
Integrating the right images on your website can help you attract your audience’s attention and guide your page visitors’ line of sight. You can use images to present important information or the things that you want your page visitors to primarily notice.
- Web design elements
You can apply the existing brand kit of the business to a framework of element dimensions, layouts, icons, and typeface to produce consistent branding on the web designs.
More than aesthetics, you also need to consider the non-visual web design elements to create a better UX. You must consider making a clean backend code, optimizing website speed, enabling mobile view, and incorporating SEO-boosting features in your website.
Knowing how to code a website that functions faultlessly, loads swiftly, and can be navigated efficiently impacts how your audience perceives your brand.
All set with the planning phase of your web design? Check out this ultimate web design checklist to set you off to the next stage.
Implementation
After mapping out the web design, you can start working on its content. This involves copy and all matters that are not related to design. You will execute your web design process plan by integrating the content into the website.
1. Development
This is where your website takes shape. The layout of your website is implemented by choosing appropriate technologies such as HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. (Check out our best programming languages tips to help you choose what technology to use.) Defining the means and shape of user interaction will help you identify which technology must be utilized.
In this step, the basic page layouts of the website are coded including the navigation bar, internal links, and visual contents.
2. Content and copy creation
Content and copy creation is an important practice in marketing. Ensure that when you are creating your content, you are providing useful information to your audience, appealing to your potential customers, and preserving your current customers by consistently providing them with engaging content through killer copywriting tips.
At this stage, you will need to create catchy headlines, write new texts, incorporate call-to-actions, and prepare meta descriptions.
You need to generate topic ideas that interest your user persona and integrate information into the different web design elements such as images, infographics, videos, and other forms of content.
Quality Assurance
The quality assurance (QA) phase is a step in the web design workflow process that gives you a chance to review your code to make updates to the user interface (UI). You will need to ensure that the end product of your website observes the business’ quality standards. You are responsible for developing and implementing inspection activities, detecting and resolving technical problems, and providing satisfactory outcomes.
1. Quality assessment of website
You will not just assess the website’s design but also its accessibility, technological framework, interactivity, and its originality.
For a website to be highly accessible, ensure that it can be loaded quickly and is accessible in different web browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions.
Perform an overall functionality test to guarantee that everything is flawlessly working and that the website can sufficiently address the users’ needs.
2. Content review
This is the process of auditing the total content of your website to identify the areas that need to be taken out, enhanced or maintained.
Make sure that your content is search engine-friendly, can efficiently speak to your target audience, has consistent formatting, is free from any syntax errors, and can perfectly showcase your cohesive brand.
Before starting your content review, it is significant to know the fundamental pages of your website. Focus your efforts first on the homepage, product and service page, call-to-action page, and social proof page since these pages are critical to your sales conversion and lead generation.
3. Blind assessment test
Conducting surveys to assess your website’s user experience from your target audience through masking your business’ information is an effective way for you to view your website from a new user perspective. This step informs you of a more detailed review of the overall web design project.
Test and Launch
With all the visuals and content set, it’s now time to test and launch your website. Thoroughly check every webpage to see if all links are functioning and the website can run on any device and web browser.
1. Site deployment
Now, it’s time for your website to reach the internet. This process moves your website to the live servers. You can use user-friendly software or research for reliable web hosting companies.
2. Post-deployment
Note that web design is an ongoing process and is constantly requiring maintenance and development. Deploying your website to the live servers is not the final step. The beauty of the web design workflow is that it will never finish. Once your website reaches the internet, you need to regularly run user testing on the new features and contents, and update it depending on the current digital trends.
You can use information you recently learned from your website evaluations to further make strategic improvements. Continual updates and revision of your online marketing strategy will ensure the continuous attainment of your business goals.
You can also add other types of online marketing strategies such as using social media advertising and content marketing to support you in reaching a wider audience.
Key takeaways
Generating an optimized web design workflow process gives you an overview of all the processes you will need to do and helps you in laying out the timeframes of every task. A smooth-running web design workflow will save you time.
Don’t forget to create an efficient web design workflow with these simple steps:
- Build a detailed web design plan set out by the project’s goals. Talk with your team and arrange the project’s objectives and limitations. Organize all your ideas and use visuals to clearly present your ideas. Weigh every risk to avoid contingencies.
- Write the content and start coding out your plan. Engage your audience through great storytelling techniques. Review your website content and functionality.
- Test and launch the website into the live server and regularly provide updates. Check out the newest trends in the market. Use your user feedback to improve your website.
Need more tips on creating a web design workflow? Send us a note on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn now, and build your perfect website with us!
