What Does the Website Design Process Actually Look Like in Practice?

For a small business owner in this day and age, a website is a hugely important asset to have. Not only do you need to have a website, but it needs to be a usable, well-designed, and informative website, as well. If you cut corners when creating your business website, you’re doing yourself and your customers a disservice.

If you need to create a new website for your business—or revamp your old one—it can help to know exactly what this entails. Being informed about the web design process will mean you’ll be able to communicate more effectively with the company that’s creating your site. This way, you can ensure you’re getting the best web development service possible.

If you want to learn more about the web design process and what this looks like in practice, this is the guide for you. Read on for everything you need to know.

The Planning Stage

Like the vast majority of projects, the web design progress begins with the planning stage. During this period, you’ll work closely with the best web developers possible to communicate your vision for your website. You’ll also work out things like the cost of small business websites, and projected timelines.

You’ll need to let them know what your goals are in creating the site and what you want it to do for you. What features do you want your site to have, what pages, what should the site architecture look like? Once you’ve got all of this information down, the design can begin.

The Design

In the design stage, you haven’t yet begun building the actual site. Instead, the web developer will take your wishlist and map it out for you. This allows you to make sure you’re on the same page, and it also gives you a clear visual representation of what your site will look like to users.

It’s important that you sign off on the site’s design before any development actually happens, otherwise, valuable time could be wasted. Once you’ve given the OK regarding the site’s design, you can begin building your business site.

Development Begins

During the development stage, your web developer will begin to create the pages that will make up your website. They will build a development framework, write code, and load content onto the site. This is where your website begins to come together and takes the form of a tangible website.

Testing Your Site

The testing stage is arguably one of the most important parts of the website development process. Technically, testing should be happening all throughout the development stage, but you’ll need to do some final tests at the end as well. You should test to weed out any bugs, but you should also be testing the UX of your site, as this is something that’s super important for a business website.

The Website Design Process

Once you’ve finished testing, your website can finally launch! And there you have it, that’s the entire website design process from start to finish. If you’re looking for more information on the different types of website you can create for your business, don’t forget to peruse the rest of our content now.