Web Design and Development Tips for Beginners

Web design is a mighty ocean and as a beginner in web designing you may find it difficult to sail on your own. At this initial stage, you must be worrying about a lot of things – like creating great websites, satisfying your client’s needs, adopting to and learning the best-in-class technology and a lot more, as the list can go on and on.

You can learn a lot from the exceptional work of existing experts in web design and soak it all in. This will certainly help you get a firm grip in this field. So all you need to do in this preliminary phase is to understand the requirements of your clients and then design an effective website that communicates their business objectives promptly to their customers.

To put an end to the dilemma of what to do next, frame a systematic process to follow every time you start up with your novel designing or development project.

Here are few effective tips for keeping you on the right track for all your web design projects and to keep you from staring blankly at your screen, while trying to remember it all or even find a place to start.

Project initiation

This stage is where you need to collect all the possible information to kickstart your designing and development work.

It is always recommended to have a face-to-face (or phone-to-phone) communication with your clients, as this will aid you in understanding their objectives clearly.

Prepare a brief note stating the client requirements, a concise summary of the client’s business, what their target market is, competitor analysis, what they actually want to communicate, along with the effective means of communication and the practicable deadline for accomplishing the project.

Maintain it properly for your future reference.

Research

The real time you invest in researching will help you throughout the entire project, all the way up until completion.

Conduct a thorough study on the history of their business. Scrutinise the close competitors in the market and their web designing practices, current trends in the market and the scope of the business in the future, as well.

This will help you save time while looking for essential information during the designing process, which helps greatly in avoiding repeat designs that your competitors have already thought of or possibly already implemented.

Strategy

This is the step where you gather all your results from researching and briefing. Based on those outcomes, make a decision on choosing the right strategy for designing and developing your website.

Select a simple theme as a base (or design and develop your own) that you think will work best for this particular website and roll it out to your client for approval before building a full-fledged final website.

Based on the client’s opinion, decide on the various tactics and methods needed to achieve the clients goals, then implement them while designing and developing your client’s dream website.

Presentation and refinement

Everything is completed and now comes the assessment arena, where you need to present your design to the client for approval. You are then expected to make the necessary changes to your design, based on the client’s feedback.

Fine tuning your design elements, as per the client requirements, at this juncture will instil their trust and help you gain their confidence.

Once you go back and forth and remedy all their concerns, then you can move on to the final step.

Production and launch

This is the final stag,e where you need to deploy the final design that is accepted by your client. It is time to launch the website, your client is happy and the finished project gets promoted on social media platforms.

You can then advise your client to send the finished product to the media, prepress and the search engine submissions for the web (or do it for them).

SOURCE: Andy Sowards