Our web design process
Step 1: Discovery Phase
Before commencing any web design project, we need to find out more about your business, goals, target customers, and main competitors. We also need to familiarise ourselves with the industry in which you operate and how you differentiate your offerings from those of the competition.
These initial meetings lead to the creation of a web design brief, outlining the requirements for the website and its intended audience.
During the web design discovery phase, we will ask key stakeholders a number of questions in order to form a better understanding of the project scope and requirements, including:
- What differentiates you from your competitors?
- How strong is the competition, and what are they doing to build their brands?
- Who is the website for?
- What does your target audience expect to see on your website, and how will they use it?
- Is the primary objective of the website to inform or entertain your audience, or are the goals more business-focused, such as lead generation and/or sales?
- Which marketing metrics are used to define the success of the website? Is it just traffic and page views? Is it dwell time and engagement rate? Or is it something more tangible, such as newsletter signups and sales?
- Does the website need to convey your brand’s core message, or is it a separate digital asset with its own individual brand and marketing strategy?
The discovery phase is unquestionably the most important part of any web design and development process. Clarifying the primary objective of the website, who it is aimed at, and how it aligns with your overall business strategy are crucial first steps towards designing the perfect website for your business.
Step 2: Sitemap creation
The key to creating an effective website taxonomy is understanding the people who will be using it.
Following the completion of the discovery phase, we will know who the website is for, how they will be using the website and what they expect to find on it. We will also have a better understanding of how the website pages and categories should be arranged in order to help the website realise its full potential.
SEO is also an important consideration when creating a website structure. A flat structure (where all pages on the site sit at the same level and have equal weight) is the perfect approach for smaller sites, while a hierarchical structure (where pages and categories site below parent pages/categories and are arranged in order of important) is more commonly found in larger and more complex sites.
Regardless of the size and complexity of the website, it needs to be easy for humans and search engines to navigate, so our web design team will begin to formulate the user journey while planning the structure of the site.
Step 3: Wireframe creation
Wireframing is an iterative process where our web designers in Surrey will create a basic outline of the most important sections of the website in order to help the key stakeholders visualise the layout of the website before the pages are fully designed.
These wireframes – or website outlines – play an important step in the evolution of the web design process. They help design teams and stakeholders reach important design decisions much faster, and they help creative teams produce optimal, user-focused prototypes and finished websites more efficiently.
The main aim of website wireframing is to communicate a possible design solution so that our designers can identify solid UX foundations to build on, and you can offer feedback on a visual item.
Our web design team will typically include the following key components in our wireframes:
- Navigation elements
- Search features
- Logos
- Header sections
- Text boxes
- Images, videos and icons
- Buttons
- Footer sections
Many of these elements will appear in the finished web design, so it makes sense to create them in wireframe format before our graphic designers in Surrey begin designing the site.
Step 4: Content and SEO
Once your website’s general structure and layout have been confirmed, the next step is to focus on the most important aspect of your site: the written content.
Content serves two main purposes:
First, content engages people and drives them to perform the actions necessary to fulfill a website’s objectives, whether that is in the form of newsletter sign-ups, contact form submissions, or product purchases. How well the website performs depends largely on how valuable the content is (the writing) and how well-presented it is (the typography and structural elements).
Second, high-quality content can also boost a website’s search engine visibility, potentially leading to more traffic and more conversions. The practice of creating, optimising and improving content to rank highly in search engines is known as SEO, and it forms a key part of our bespoke digital marketing strategies.
There are four key stages to integrating new and existing content into the web design process:
- Content review – whether we are designing a website for a start-up or an established business, we will collate and analyse all of the information needed to tell your story, impart key marketing messages and communicate the brand style and tone of voice. We will also review the ratio of text to images, photographs, graphics, videos and other forms of multimedia.
- Content plan creation – our content marketing team will work with you to develop a content plan for your new website. This is a collaborative process, designed to ensure that the planned content works within the design framework and effectively communicates the brand proposition.
- SEO analysis – working in conjunction with our web designers in Surrey, our SEO engineers will take a snapshot of the site’s current rankings in Google and Bing. This acts as a benchmark of the new website’s SEO performance. To perform this analysis, we use a variety of industry-leading SEO tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking.
- SEO strategy creation – if you wish to take advantage of our award-winning SEO services, we will create an SEO plan for the website launch, and we will formulate an ongoing SEO strategy to help skyrocket your rankings once the site has gone live.
Step 5: Homepage and inner page designs
Once our web designers have all of the information they need, they will set about transforming the low-fidelity wireframes into breathtakingly beautiful website designs that not only tell your story, but also perfectly align with the requirements of your target audience.
The homepage is often your only chance to create a great first impression, so our designers place a particular emphasis on ensuring that everything looks and feels just right. Using a combination of ideas from your brand guidelines (if supplied), the discovery phase and user journey mapping, we will create a homepage design that is completely unique to your
business.
Once the homepage design is signed off, we will move on to the next part of the web design process: the important internal pages.
We do not design every page on the site, as many of the pages will share the same visual layout. However, we will generally create unique designs for the following subpages:
- Pages with unique layouts
- Pages with special functionality, such as contact forms, pricing calculators and interactive elements
- Pages that use key templates, such as individual blog posts or portfolio/case study pages
Each and every website we create is completely unique, so the number of internal pages that we design will differ greatly between each project.
Step 6: Interactive prototype
The next step in the web design process is to convert the static homepage and inner page designs into interactive prototypes that you can navigate, just as you would a live website.
By creating interactive prototypes, our web designers and developers are able to bring their intended UX and UI flows to life, test any interactivity that forms a core part of the design and also give them a point of reference when it comes to coding the website.
Interactive prototypes allow key stakeholders to “use” the website in the same way that their target audience would, which can help to quickly identify any issues with how the website works. Prototyping tools such as InVision and Figma also make it easy to collect and act upon client feedback, ensuring a seamless move from design to development.
Step 7: Web development
Once the homepage and subpage designs have been signed off, our web developers will begin building a fully functional staging stage that you will be able to navigate and interactive with. This will give you an opportunity to provide valuable feedback as the site evolves, and will help ensure that the finished website exceeds all expectations.
For more information on our web development process, please visit our “Web Development” page.