Our method for web design starts with obtaining a clear understanding of the objectives of the website and how they relate to mission of your business or organization. This is not as clear-cut as it may at first seem, because often in the process of creating the specifications for the job early assumptions about the project turn out to be false and information that impacts design is often missing. We avoid these situations by assuming nothing about what you want from your website beyond best practices for its’ construction, usability and search engine optimization.
We start with defining what would make your project a success in your eyes. How will you measure the success of your website? Will it be measured in online sales, inbound email, an increase in web traffic, completed contact forms, user-generated content or something else entirely? When we have an understanding of your concept of success we have a guiding principle for the design process. Many of our clients define success on more than one level, and that’s fine. Getting at what is vital for your success should be the overarching goal as we move forward on your design.
We follow our understanding of your success with an in-depth look at your business process. Once we know what it is you do we now have a place from which to understand how your new (or newly redesigned) website should fit within your current business model and practices.
We look at your business model in order to develop our database structures. By getting to know you and your business we can better design our data structures to more closely represent the real-life details and relationships in your business. For example, if you sell widgets we will want to know all we can about the widgets you sell and what pieces of information are important to keep in data and to present on your site.
Once we have the database design (schema) created we can finally then look at what most people consider “design” – the look and feel, colors and fonts, layouts and theme of your new site. We’ll discuss this more in another blog post later.
Knowing you is the first step in our design process. If you want a web developer to get to know you, request a quote.
No Comments, Comment or Ping
Reply to “Knowing You – the First Design Step”