When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are just getting started as a web designer. Good guidelines can help you work better by keeping forgetfulness to a minimum.

Every designer or company will develop unique components to their web design process over time, but the basics remain the same: learn, plan, design, code, launch and maintain.

In this article, I will share my process for designing a website.

Before we get into it, let me first share two parallel processes that should be taking place throughout your design process.

The first thing you should be doing continuously is seeking feedback. You’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort by getting feedback at regular intervals.

The second thing you should do continuously is testing. Test the heck out of everything as you go to avoid mega-headaches down the road.

With that said, let’s get started!

1. Learn

What do you think is the most important step of the web design process? Planning? Designing? Coding?

Guess again.

It shouldn’t surprise you that learning — discovering and understanding what you need to build in the first place — is the most important part of the entire website design process.

Why? It’s simple, really. The more you know about what you need to accomplish, the better your chances will be of creating a successful website.

Think of it like this: If you are an archer, don’t you need to know where to aim your arrow? That’s what the target is for. The little red dot in the middle is the bullseye. Since it’s smaller, it’s harder to hit, but even if you aim for it and miss, you’re sure to get closer than if you aimed your arrow up into the air and hoped for a random direct hit.

So how can you score a bullseye as a web designer? Before you go any further, you need to define what hitting the bullseye in your project means.

As a web designer, hitting the bullseye is giving your clients what they want — it’s what they are paying you for.

What clients want varies widely on a case-by-case basis. Since you aren’t a mind reader (no, you’re not), you need to proactively find out what they want.

In some cases, they may not even know what they want, and in other cases, they may have a hard time verbalizing what they have envisioned because they don’t know industry terms and concepts like CSS, Ajax, or relational databases.

The Creative Brief

Fortunately, there’s a tool web designers can use to easily gather this information. It’s called a creative brief. A creative brief is basically a series of questions that you ask your clients so that you can understand the scope and goals of a project.

You can ask these questions during a face-to-face meeting or a phone call — or you can simply make a web form available on your website that handles the answers of your clients.

You should obtain this information in the way you and your clients are most comfortable with — but whatever you do, don’t skip the creative brief because it will become the lifeblood of your project.

What kind of questions should you ask in your creative brief? At the minimum, find out:

• The client’s target audience
• Their primary and secondary goals for the website
• Current branding characteristics
• Budget
• Deadlines they need to meet

I also like asking clients what websites they like and don’t like to give me a visual idea of where I should be heading and what I should avoid.

You might also want to find out if they need an online store, if they already have a logo (if not, you can make one for them), who will be responsible for maintaining the site once it goes live, and so forth.

You might have unique questions that you will want to include; use them and don’t be afraid to tailor your questions on a per-project basis.

2. Plan

Once you’ve learned what you need to build, it’s time to start planning how you are going to make it happen. Before you can start designing a website, you need to know exactly what, and how, to design it in the first place — and it all starts with creating a design strategy.

Your design strategy for each website you make should be handcrafted to fit the client’s vision (if you are designing a site for yourself, then you would qualify as the client).

So what factors will shape your design strategy? The creative brief will act as the foundation of your plan by providing you with some basic information, such as what your timeframes are and who the target audience of the website is.

It’s especially important to know your audience because it will affect where and how the site gets viewed. For example, will you also need to create a mobile version or an iPad-specific version that works with touch?

Research and Note-Taking

Whatever gaps are left in the overall strategic picture will need to be filled by doing some research of your own. Now is the time to visit competing websites and see what types of designs are already out there in the target market so you will know how to differentiate your own design.

See who comes up first in a Google search and try to find out why. Within 10 minutes, you should be able to start piecing together the beginnings of your design plan.

While you are researching, you’ll also start brainstorming about what colors to use, where to place the call(s)-to-action, what kind of fonts you should use and other similar details.

At this point, you should also be taking notes, snapping screenshots and starting a mood board.

Sketching and Mock-Up

Next, it’s time to create a mock-up and start letting your ideas take on more of a tangible state. I like to start by sketching out my ideas on a regular old piece of paper, as do many other web designers.

Other people prefer to use a wireframing tool like OmniGraffle. During this phase, not only will you want to start thinking seriously about the layout of the site, but also the structure of your site and how the navigation will shape up.

This is your chance to see what works best and a good place to experiment with different ideas before actually hitting Photoshop or Illustrator to create something more concrete.

Pick Your Tools

This part of the process is also the perfect opportunity to assess which tools you will need to use. You absolutely should not fall into a pattern of using a predetermined set of tools for each site you create. It’s a potentially hazardous practice for everyone involved, including the site’s end users and the client (not to mention how monotonous your portfolio would look).

Put some real thought into what content management system would work the best considering the site’s goals, whether or not including Flash at all is a good idea, and so on.

3. Design

Now I know there are many web designers out there who like to skip directly to the design stage without giving a second thought to learning or planning, but design is more than just the act of creating. You want to actually create something good and useful and you just can’t do that without first doing some preliminary work before starting to design.

If you’ve already done the legwork of learning and planning, it makes the actual designing much easier. When you don’t have to worry about the little details, it really opens up a whole new level of effectiveness and productivity because you can focus on more important things.

Once you are ready to start designing, keep in mind that you need to design more than just a home page. You’ll need a design for the sub-pages of your site as well. It can sometimes be easy to design a home page concept, slice it up and start coding only to get to sub-pages and have no direction. You may also need to design a mobile or iPad version of your site as well.

The design phase itself is straightforward. Just open up Photoshop (or your graphics creation tool of choice) and start bringing your mock-up to life. Sweat the details. Make it pixel perfect. Even if you feel like the project you are working on is more boring that staring at a wall for 24 hours straight, put your all into it. Your client will notice and you’ll be proud of the work you did.

You’ll have to decide at this point whether you want to use real content in your design or some dummy text (e.g. Lorem Ipsum). There are plenty of fans in either camp, but I personally prefer to use real copy and photos if they are available to make it as close to reality as possible.

During the design phase, it is incredibly important to seek feedback often to make sure all specified requirements have been met. If the client wants to make changes, now is the time to do it before the design is sliced and coded, making it ten times more difficult to make what would be a simple change if you were to do it during the design phase.

4. Code

Once you have a killer design, you’ll need to turn it into a real, live website. A safe bet, no matter what content management system you are going to be working with, is to start with a generic HTML and CSS template.

Start with a Base Template

If you’re like me, you’ve already got a set of starter HTML and CSS files ready to go that are already linked to each other and already contain some basic starter code (such as a CSS reset).

If you’re not like me and don’t have these generic files at the ready, go ahead and create some that you can reuse at this stage in the future.

Before you go any further, it’s a good idea to go ahead and add in your title, descriptions and meta tags, or at least make a note of what they should be if you are going to be using a content management system later on.

Lay Out the Main Sections and Content

Begin carving up your HTML/CSS by inserting the major sections (your main <div>s) for your header, footer and content area.

Next, begin adding your text and image content. The goal is to keep your markup as semantic as possible so that each element is meaningful.

Avoid divitis — the act of utilizing too many divs. For example, you don’t need a div just to contain the logo. Try using an <h1> or a <p> instead — it can be styled exactly the same way (e.g. making them into a block elements using the display CSS property).

Validate and Test

Don’t forget to make sure your code validates by using the validation tool provided by the W3C (but also understand that validation tools have shortcomings).

You’ll also need to do some browser testing to make sure the site looks and acts as intended and provides a uniform brand experience no matter how a user accesses it. You can use a tool like Browsershots if you have limited access to different types of computers.

Use Firebug and YSlow to debug your site and make sure your work is running at an optimal speed.

One last thing: don’t forget to implement Google Analytics or your favorite analytics alternative so you won’t miss out on tracking the stats during the big launch.

5. Launch

When you’ve finally perfected the site, it’s time to release it to the public. Launching can mean different things to different people, mostly because there are various content management systems and development circumstances out there.

For instance, if you are redesigning a site that uses a content management system or publishing platform, your launch may be as simple as applying a new theme.

If you are designing a brand new site in a sandbox or local development environment, then ‘going live’ means FTP’ing your files to the production server.

6. Maintain

During your planning phase, you should have determined who will be in charge of site maintenance. If a client is unable to maintain the site, you may want to suggest that they hire you on a regular or as-needed basis to manage and perform maintenance tasks.

During the hand-off/closeout of the project, it might also help to provide some guidelines and basic training to your client to make sure they understand how to properly maintain the site.

(Via Six Revisions.)

Why Designers Should Learn How to Code: ”

More often than not, designers have rightfully been accused of retreating into their cocoons of ignorance as soon as their work of creating a web design is finished, leaving the dirty and more hands-on work of putting it up on the web to developers. This apathy is prevalent not only in the web-building industry, but also in software and game engineering.

The hard truth is that the buck of development should stop with designers. For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.

Designing Realistic and Doable Designs

With a clear image of how the final product will be actualized, a designer will come up with more feasible and practical concepts. Being an integral part of the development process, they carry the responsibility of ensuring their designs translate well into a web-based medium that takes into account: usability, web accessibility, and achievability. A user-friendly website is not only a picnic to navigate from one page to another in a clear and concise flow of logic, but also provides a user with all the information they need without being too overbearing or cluttered. The only real way to know if a web layout works or not is learning how to build it yourself.

Easier Communication

Virtually all products designed but implemented by different parties never satisfy both sides’ expectations, especially when it comes to intangible products like websites, software, or games. It normally comes down to a compromise between what it should have been and what, in reality, it can be.  Whereas the general idea is captured, it is seldom replicated verbatim. The panacea: designers should preach water and drink it too!  This avoids confusion, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation.

Convenient Iterative Development Process

A design, in practice, should not be absolute. By this, I mean that it should be flexible and affable to change without distorting its intrinsic essence to meet the systems’ technical constraints. These repetitive and necessary alterations can only be realized by the original designer. A designer slash developer can iterate more quickly where necessary, rather than having a developer resubmit the design to the designer, who is rarely at hand, to implement the alterations. This situation can create friction – and it often does – between designers and developers.

Better and More Harmonious Results

I often like drawing parallels between software, web, or game development to orchestral music where the designer is the composer and the developer is the ensemble’s maestro or conductor. Imagine if the latter had the composer’s score? Wouldn’t the symphonies be awesome, captivating, and unadulterated? Not only were they crafted by a master craftsman, but conducted by their creator!

Shorter Development Time

The designers doubling up as coders implies that the design and coding processes occur at least sequentially, if not concurrently. This results in a shorter development timeframe – and who doesn’t care about efficiency?

Designers become More Marketable

Modern day designers worth their salt need to up their portfolio, and up their game, if they want to remain relevant; it’s no longer enough to have one set of skills. Oftentimes, we’re required to wear various hats: designer, front-end developer, content writer, and project manager.

By learning to implement what you design rather than leaving it orphaned in the hands of developers – you increase your value. After all, citing design and coding skills in one‘s resume does not hurt. On the contrary, it makes one less redundant and indispensable, a life and death determinant in these financially tumultuous times of corporate restructuring (read: mass retrenchments) and downsizing (read: firing).

However, in so much as designers should also code their innovations, there are downsides to this scenario.

Quoting Lukas Mathis in one of the controversial article about the topic called ‘Designers are not Programmers’¹:

If the designer implements his own designs, he is beholden to two different goals: Clean code and great user experience. These two goals contradict each other. If you have to implement your own designs, you’re bound to compromise for the sake of code quality, which is bad for your interaction design.

‘

Designers who implement their own designs face two issues: They know when a neat new idea will create messy code, and they know about all the existing code that would be touched by a change to the user experience. The two goals are at odds, because the user experience is all about the little details, and those little details all end up being messy bits of code you would rather not have to write.

This aptly summarizes the hard stance taken by web development purists. They are of the old school of thought that advocates for clear-cut lines between design and development.  Apparently, designers create for humans, developers create for computers. Thus, UX designers should design the best possible user interface and leave the developers to make the best possible programming decisions. While this holds some merit as I’ve found myself trying unsuccessfully to abstract my mind from the code when I’m working on a user interface, it is ultimately more convenient to have the technical and usability constraints in perspective.

(Via Six Revisions.)

(Via Ian Scott.)

I’ve been posting links to new blog posts on Twitter since I started using it two years ago. It’s just a natural thing, another step in the publishing process. You can see very clearly where it fits in by looking at the button-bar in my editing window.

Here’s the process.

Step 1. Write the initial draft. Organize. Edit.

Step 2. Save. This publishes the piece to scripting.com, both on the home page, and on its own story page. I repeat this step until I’m ready to have the story appear in the RSS feed. (I don’t mind if readers see the interim versions, I imagine it’s somewhat interesting, if not it doesn’t seem to do much harm.)

Step 3. Build RSS. I know that many RSS clients will only read an item once, so I wait to rebuild the RSS that includes the new piece until it’s pretty much finished. I might still add some pictures, or links or tweak up some wording, but by the time it goes out in the feed, it’s not likely to change much.

Step 4. Twit-It posts the link to Twitter. I get to edit the link text before it goes out, but it does the work of creating a short URL and smashing it together with the headline before presenting it to me in a dialog.

This last step is relatively new, but its import is starting to settle in. In a real way a story isn’t published until I’ve pushed it through Twitter. I expect over time, as more systems hook into Twitter, it will come to mean more. Of course I will, as long as Twitter has a 140-character limit, publish everything on the web and in RSS. This article so far has 2291 characters, or 16 tweets.

Another way of saying the same thing is that Twitter has become the newspaper of record. In a few years what’s left of the news industry will call Twitter a parasite and demand royalties. Too bad they don’t see this coming, and create an even better news system built around the principles of Twitter and instead of asking for alms they’re getting a piece of the PE.

Sidebar to the Twitter bizdev people: Wish I had upside in Twitter, so I could be motivated to make these things work in your company’s product. But I’m a greedy capitalist just like you, and with my ‘stock’ in Twitter diminishing in value every day (through dilution), I have to look elsewhere for my upside. You might think of this as a challenge or a puzzle, figure out how to incentivize your users to make you even richer.

(Via Scripting News.)

So you’ve put together a spectacular website, and you’re ready to go live on the Internet for the whole world to see. Not so fast there Bucky. In case you didn’t know, there are a few essential requirements that every site needs to include in order to be successful.

Let’s review, shall we:

1) Privacy Policy/Disclaimer: Now, I’m not a lawyer and don’t claim to be one, but these two documents should be standard issue for every site you have. People want to know how you’re going to use their personal information, and a “privacy policy” does just that.

In today’s litigious society you’ll also need to include a disclaímer/terms of use page. This protects you and spells out to your visitors what they’re agreeing to by using your website. If you don’t know where to start in generating these documents, you’ll find plenty of help online.

2) Contact Us Information: I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve been to that fail to include a way to contact the owner. If you can’t include a phone number, at the very least have an email address or a “contact us” form. By providing this information, you’ll make your visitors feel more comfortable knowing there’s a way to reach you should the need arise.

3) Search Box/Site Map: If your site is rather large, you’ll also want to include a way to search, or have what is called a “site map”. There are many ways to add a search function to your site, the easiest being to use Google’s free service or try PicoSearch A site map sounds technical, but it’s just one web page that contains links to every page of your site, usually broken down by category. Some resources to help can be found at FreeFind.

4) Google Analytics/Tracking System: Once your site is up and running you’ll want to keep your eye on traffic. Who’s visiting your website, what pages are the most popular, where is the traffic coming from. All of these questions and more can be answered by using a good analytics program.

There are several ways to add a thorough tracking system to your site, but the easiest and one that won’t cost you a dime is Google Analytics Once registered, you can add as many sites as you like all under one user ID and password. You’ll be given some code to copy and paste on your pages. Simple, easy, and you’re done.

5) Newsletter Sign Up/RSS Feed: There’s an old saying that people won’t buy from you the very first time they come to your website, so you need a way to stay in touch with them to bring them back again and again. By offering a newsletter, also known as an ezine, you’ll be building a list of possible prospects which is invaluable to any site owner.

You can also provide an RSS feed for your newsletter, or updates to your blog or site. This makes it easy for others to keep up with your most recent posts. The best service for this is FeedBurner.

6) Consistent Navigation: This might sound like a no brainer, but many folks get it wrong. No matter what type of menu system you decide upon, make sure it stays the same across the board on all pages of your site.

Your job is to guide your visitors through your website, making sure they always know where they are and how to get to where they need to go.

7) Search Engine Optimized Copy: At first glance you might not think this is so important, but trust me it is. You want your pages to rank well with the search engines and there are a few steps you can take to ensure this happens.
Forget Expensive PPC Advertising – There is an Alternative!

Each page of your website should be optimized for 2, or at the most 3 keywords/phrases. Weave the keywords into your titles and into the body of each page. You can also include them in your image titles, alt tags, even in the names you give your pages. Look at each page individually and decide what it’s about, then optimize accordingly.

Social Media Share Button: With the popularity of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, you’d be foolish not to include an easy way for your content to be shared with others.

You’ll find many free services that will give you the code you need to instantly add a “share button” to your web pages so that visitors can instantly share them with their friends.

By Merle – MerlesWorld.com

I do wonder at times if some Twitter users have any time to get any work done. Several of the more prolific ones that I follow swear they spend no more than 30 minutes a day on Twitter, but I really find that hard to believe. Many times it seems they are twittering just to say something, like ‘Good morning Twitterverse’ when they begin their day, give more details than I want to know about what they had for lunch, what their children said to them, or when they take a nap.

I realize that this is part of the ‘like, know, and trust’ process that enables people to get to know each other, but sometimes it’s simply too much information..LOL. I’m Twittering primarily to market my business. Consequently, I try and limit my personal twitters to no more than 2 per day. My clients, who create Twitter accounts for marketing, as well, tell me, ‘I’m signed up. Now what in the world do I Twitter about? How do I market my business with this tool?’

Here are 10 strategies that I use regularly to market my business and my expertise via Twitter. Remember, you have only 140 characters for your tweet (Twitter post).

1. How you’re helping clients. Talk about specific ways that your business helps clients and use their Twitter ID if you have their permission, i.e. ‘Just finished @clientname brainstorm great Internet marketing plan for 2009″ or ‘Finally finished setting up Quickbooks for local hardware store — now they can invoice their clients’

2. What you’re doing in your business. This is a perfect time to tell others when you’re blogging, writing an article, creating your weekly ezine, recording your podcast, i.e. ‘Had great interview with Jane Smith today on speaking to grow your biz. Great ideas! Subscribe to podcast & listen here (URL here)’

3. Useful tool or resource you’ve found. I run across these all the time in my daily activities, and Twitter is a perfect place to share,. i.e. ‘Found great new Firefox plug-in to monitor & check multiple Gmail accounts at same time at (URL here)’ or ‘Read great blog post on workíng at home with kids under 5 at (URL here)’

4. Ask a question. Need some ideas or some quick brainstorming? Twitter is an ideal place to gather opinions, i.e. ‘Help! Desperately seeking new laser prínter. Recommendations?’ or ‘How do I find training organizations online?’

5. Conduct a survey. What do your Tweeps think about a particular issue? Ask them via Twitter, i.e. ‘Quick poll: Do you get more clients from Facebook or Twitter? Respond at (URL here)’

6. Report on live events. The latest Twitter trend seems to be tweeting what’s happening at conferences or workshops. In order for Twitter users to follow a particular event, it’s usually referred to by a name preceded by a # sign, as in #JVAlert, for example, to make it simpler for people who want to follow those posts. So, if you were at an event, you might tweet ‘#JVAlert John Smith speaking on affiliate programs. Just got great idea on training affiliate managers!’ Just don’t get so wrapped up in tweeting that you ignore the content delivered in the conference!

7. Product or service launch. If you’re about to launch a new product or introduce a new product, let your Twitter followers know, i.e. ‘Pre-launch pricing for new DVD set about how baby boomers can start an online biz. Get $100 early bird discount at (URL here)’

8. Responding to others with advice or answers. The way to build professional relationships on Twitter is to help your tweeps. So, if someone asks a question, comments about something to which you have a response or an idea, or you want to ask a followup question, this is the perfect place to do so.

By Donna Gunter (c) 2008

”

(Via KDI Media : Savannah, GA.)

Imagine trying to tell someone what you want your site look like – it’s not an easy task. A website’s overall look and color scheme is the first and most significant impression you can make on a first time web site visitor.

Our web designers work with our clients to develop the right look and feel for their website.

By following what we refer to as the “who, what, when, where, why and how of web design” we ensure each web design meets a projects unique requirements.