Place of design

Begin your quest for a website by planning exactly what you want.  I will re-phrase that.  Begin your quest for a website by planning what your customers need and want.  Often plans are unilaterally focused on the business, when in virtually all instances; everything ought to be geared to the end users

With website planning, bear in mind the 5 P’s
Prior planning and preparation prevents problems

If you went to the bank, the manager would insist on a business plan before even considering funding your website.  This is for a sound reason.  Your website plan should include all the same probing elements as a regular plan

Four W’s – Who?  Where?  What?  Why?
Who are your customers?  Where are they?  What do they do online?  What products do they want?  What are there needs?  Why would they want to come to you?

In essence we are talking about a focused plan.   Focused on the demographic of your customer, focused on the needs and desires of your potential customers, focused on getting them onto your site and then converting them into sales, and keeping them as loyal customers

What not to focus on

You.  Many sites have irrelevant content.  We have all seen the juvenile sites where there is a comment along the lines of “I am 18 and just left college and now I am a professional freelance wedding photographer, and I like heavy metal and cars”  Well lots of grown up sites subtly fall into the same trap

Yes, talk about you – but only to add value to your business, or to increase customer confidence.  Do this with care.  Often site owners are “too close to he copy” meaning they view the texts on their sites with blinkers, and can’t see the problems.  At the point of signing off the copy – get a third party to check

Getting started

You have a well thought out plan.  At some point you are going to need to choose a designer or developer, and collide your ideas with theirs.  This is a key make or break stage in the success of your site

The customer-developer-customer-developer-customer cycle of idea creation is a powerful one and can add lots of value to your project. However you need to keep your eye on the ball, and ensure that 100% of the focus of your original plan remains

The point of the information / ideas exchange in the initial process with the developer is to find out if the developer has ideas that add value to your project.  Often we see things in a way that the client had never imagined was possible. The flip side of this is that some designers and developers will attempt to massage over the “trickier bits” of your build

During this information exchange, you will have a pretty good feeling as to he working relationship you will have with your designer / developer

What will the website designer / developer need?

At this stage, we are talking about content.  Well organised content.  Content focused on the needs of your customers as outlined in your plan.  Make sure you keep your content “on topic”

You may be employing a copywriter, if so, they will need your plan, and the idea of the scale of your site

Organisation is the key here.  Well organised sites have consistent navigation, and content falls into clearly defined sections.  Your content ought to fall on the equivalent of the family tree in structure – the front page at the top of the tree, and the sections and content below.   This structure will directly reflect navigation within the site.  If any content item is more than 3 or four clicks away from the front page, you need to re-organise the structure.  We do this in our office with a white board and “Post It” notes.  When you are done – if your model looks like a plate of spaghetti, you haven’t organised your content properly

When writing the content, begin with what your site is primarily focused on.  Your site will fall into clear sections, write articles for the core sections and areas of focus first, and then plan sub sections afterwards.  You may need FAQ’s and glossary or other supporting articles.  Write these next.  Your articles ought to be forming a tree – spreading away from the main front page.  The last documents to sort out relate to your business the “about us” page, shipping policies etc…

Your website will now have a consistent organised and structured content.  You will have begun the process of figuring out the navigation.  You now need to pick out the “very important things” that appear on each page of your website  On most (not all) sites, this is what lands in the header, and footer of the page

Dealing with images

Either you or your developer will need to provide images and photography.  We are pretty unique hear at Place of design, in that we actually can shoot it specifically for a website

What ever route you go down you need to consider several things: Relevancy, design, and licensing.  In the planning stage, you ought o be specifying your imagery, and possibly sourcing example images or the real images.  Do not underestimate the effort needed to get the correct photographs and images – we sometimes spend days and weeks on this part of the build

If your site needs it, consider visual consistency between the images.  Are they all landscape, portrait?  Will they need to be colour or black and white?  Do they all need to be full frame cropped, or distant? Are they high key (with a white background) or with mixed backgrounds?

One or two key shots commissioned for your site, taken by a professional can absolutely make the difference between a good site and an excellent one.  You may spend £2000 on a site, and then £500 for one image, shot specifically for your front page, that increases your sites appeal so much that conversion doubles or more

Shaking it all up and making some sense of it

Your website is about marketing your business and products, or promoting your organisation, or just conveying information.  You now need to look at your key marketing messages, and re-look at all of your content, optimising and tweaking it to your customers needs and marketing message.  You need to look at all of the articles as a group, and iron out inconsistencies

This is a really important stage, as getting this right will ensure visitors get a clear consistent message from page to page as they navigate through your site

You may have heard about search engine optimisation – well this is the stage where you play your part.  You will need advice from your designer or SEO consultant, but essentially, you need to ensure the right keywords and phrases are woven into your copy at this stage.  Your SEO expert will still need to make fine adjustments to the site down the line – really at this stage we are providing a sensible broad framework for the content based search engine optimisation

To be absolutely fair, well organised, structured and written content, is 95% of the way to being optimised in the first place.  We do not recommend writing content for search engines for search engines sake, we recommend writing real, relevant customer focused content, and sensibly tweaking it to perform well on a search engine

The website design

You have the pictures, the content, and it is all structured and ready to go – What happens next?

The designer will design and create the template or visual framework for the site. They will make sure that the structure you laid out, fits the menus, the information common to all pages fits

The website designer may be using a content management system (CMS) or just flat webpage’s – whichever method of delivering the pages, the templating stage is the same

At this point the typography of the site is generally chosen.  This determines the choices and usage of fonts, and will affect readability

Adding any interactive bits and pieces

At this point things like stores, blogs, forums, galleries, and other bespoke interactive bits are added, and styled to the main site.  It is worth noting that many of these products are “off the shelf” but still require localisation, and text adjustments to match the rest of your site.  They will also need careful styling to ensure they sympathetically blend in with the rest of your site

Editing content, after the site has been templated

The best made plans may not take into account the visual effect the template had on the content.  At this stage, we go back and look at all the content, and edit where required.  The content consists of text, headlines, tables, figures, images etc.

If there is a global issue, we may adjust all of the fonts globally, if there are individual problems with the way lines break, or with specific images, we tackle them as we find them

Pretty much the site is done now

Wrong.  Now the site needs to be tested – on different browsers, operating systems.  Your site also needs to be tested at different broadband speeds, by different users.  This process is vitally important

If the site has interactive features, they need to be comprehensively tested too

It is also worth taking a sample of people from your target demographic and using them to assist the testing process of your site too.  What is obvious to a 19 year old may not be obvious to a senior user.  What makes sense in the way you phrased something to a senior, may be totally misunderstood by a youngster

Marketing and Search engine optimisation

I eluded earlier in the article that SEO was something that will need to be re-visited

At the completion of the site, your SEO consultants may need to begin work optimising for keywords and writing clever code in the structure of the site to ensure your site is ranked well.  Often your website designer/developer does this automatically as the site is developed.

Regardless of the exact process in the beginning, the measurement, marketing and tweaking of your site to ensure you are hitting the spot ought to be an ongoing process

Ongoing maintenance

Things change, sites grow, servers get patched, and security loopholes need resolving.  Agreeing an ongoing maintenance contract with your website developer/designer is vital to ensure your site remains healthy and up to date

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