How to Create Web Design
There are over 1.5 billion websites on the world wide web today. Every day, hour, minute, and even second, their number increases several times more. Some sites are inactive, while others are used every day, and people cannot imagine their life without them. Although there are already many websites and the competition between them is vast, people still want to create something of their own and introduce new ideas to the world. And the main question is how to make website design so that people will like to use it every day?
This article helps you understand how to create a web site that will be in demand among users and bring income to your business.
Do you want to understand why website design is important? Then we offer you read our article about what is website design and what benefits it provides for business.
Step 1: Website design planning
How to make a good website design? It all starts with the first phase-web design plan. If you start creating web design without a plan, this can lead to a loss of time and money.
Usually, Gapsy Studio designers follow a website design plan which consists of such items:
- We discuss the project with our customers to understand their requirements before we proceed to the designing stage;
- We discover what brand the website should promote (a website that promotes sales or the customer simply wants to attract more attention to the brand)
- We study the features that a future website should contain to determine an approximate design. Also, we should know the target audience of the prospective website to provide the audience with what they exactly want.
These tips will help us build a good-looking UI/UX website design and avoid unwanted mistakes and revisions.
Step 2: Website design competitor research
When you have decided on the site’s topic, type, and purpose and have made an approximate plan, it’s time to study the competitors carefully. When you research competitor websites, pay attention to where and how information is located, what site structure and functionality is implemented. After analyzing a couple of dozens of sites, you will probably see the standard features and patterns inherent to the desired subject sites.
The site’s visual component is one of the designer’s most essential tasks because it should be convenient and beautiful. You need to choose the fonts, the main shades, think about the design of the blocks, the organization of information on the page.
If you are new to design, doing it yourself is a dubious decision. It’s best to find examples of sites that you like and adopt some ideas. Just do not redraw the site that you liked utterly — this is open plagiarism. We recommend you to make a selection of a couple of dozens (or more) sites of related topics, the design of which you liked. You can find many good examples on Dribbble, for instance. You need to stand out somehow to be competitive, so it’s better to turn to professionals who know a lot about their work, and you don’t have any problems in creating a website design.
Step 3: Web UX design
After you have decided on your website’s concept, it’s worth starting directly with the creation of the design. Here comes the UI UX web design.
To understand more precisely what it is, you can read our article about UI and UX differences.
You should develop an understanding of what the site design should be by this stage. It’s time to think about how to make it. First, we need to create the so-called “skeleton” of the website- the wireframe. Wireframes provide a framework for the site’s visual design and content elements keeping, and help reveal potential challenges and gaps with the sitemap. Even though a wireframe doesn’t have any final design elements, it does act as a guide for how the site will look like in the end. It can also serve as inspiration for the formatting of various elements. UX is an integral part of creating a design, especially if you have more than just a landing page since website usability is significant for the retention rate.
Previously, only Photoshop was used to create wireframes, but the modern designer has much more website design tools. Now there are a huge number of helper that will easily create wireframes for you exactly the way you want. Among those wireframe web design apps, we recommend Sketch and Figma.
When you choose a program to create a site, think again about your goals. If you need a small site which will not promote your business, then you can create it by yourself. A home-made website can be very useful at first if you want to try to create it by yourself, but it will not give you either brand recognition or high lead conversion. If you plan to reach a higher level and reach some business peaks, then it is better to turn to specialists and professionals in this business who have extensive experience in this and they know exactly what it takes to create a good looking, neat and responsive website design.
Step 4: Website design content creation
Continuing the web design process you should also create written content-one of the most important website design elements.
First, it worth telling that content attracts and makes readers make the actions that fulfill a site’s goals.
The too long, boring, and lifeless text will rarely hold the attention of readers. It’s important to create content that’s fast, intriguing, and exciting, which will also make you jump to other pages. Even if you have a lot of content, you should break it down properly into short paragraphs, complementing it with visually beautiful illustrations and elements. Content also contributes to SEO (search engine optimization).
For proper site operation, you need to find the right words and phrases. Well-written content, informative, and accessible correct words are better perceived by search engines and make it easier to find your site.
Step 5: Website UI design
Step by step website design process requires more and more details. The next step is to create the visual style for the site-web ui design. Before embarking on UI design, Gapsy Studio designers usually provide their clients with a moodboard. Moodboard is a kind of preview of future design. It helps to present and coordinate the client in visual components of the project:
- Photos or illustrations.
- Color schemes.
- Fonts
- Slogans or headlines.
- Logos of the company of the customer or the promoted product.
- Icons, buttons, patterns.
In general, you need to include all the graphic materials that will clearly make it obvious what the spirit and mood of the project will be. All elements are collected in the form of a collage on one board.
Images are becoming very important in web design compared to previous years. Your site will gain a more professional look and can gain more trust if it contains high-quality images.
The number of clicks and engagement is what increases visual content. In addition to making the page easy to read, images also improve text and can convey important messages.
Illustration design also has great advantages in design. Illustrations allow you to personalize your brand and create a unique image that will make your brand unmistakable. Illustrations, especially hand-drawn ones, will make your site unique. In addition, they will be crafting (handmade) — and this is now in fashion. Users will immediately understand that real people worked on the site, put their soul into it, tried.
The illustration may not even fit within the meaning, but be executed with such a sense of style that it will decorate any resource. And certainly will attract the attention of visitors.
To get high-quality photos, it is best to turn to professionals in this matter. And also remember that massive images can seriously slow down the site. You should also make sure your images are responsive to your site i.e they are suitable in size and resolution for any type of device that a person uses.
If you succeed in doing web interface design correctly,it can well affect the success of your site. Keep the following facts in mind designing your interface:
- make your interface simple
- use common UI design elements
- purposeful creating a page layout
- use strategically color and structure
- use the right typography
Our designers from Gapsy Studio also use ui kit for projects. In simple words, the User interface kit is used to simplify, unify, and have an integrated approach to creating large projects. It not only allows you to quickly and accurately create each next page using components and modeled on the previous ones, but it is also the main design document of the project, with which everyone is checked: designers, layout designers, developers at each stage of work on the project.
Step 6: Web design prototyping and testing
Once the site has all its visuals and content you can prototype your website. Website design prototype is interactive demo of a website. It is used to collect feedback from interested project members in the early stages of working with the project, before final development.
The prototype allows you to see how the final result will look at the beginning of the project. You can test everything regarding the structure and layout of your site and collect user reviews thanks to usability testing. Prototyping can be carried out several times until the team is sure that they can proceed to the next stage.
If web prototyping was made good you’re ready for website design test. Test each page carefully and make sure all links work and that they load properly. Also pay attention to meta headers and page descriptions. Even the word order in headings and descriptions can affect page performance.
Step 7: Launch web design
Finishing website design process steps it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the website design process. When everything has been thoroughly tested, and you’re happy with the site, it’s time to launch it.
Do not think that everything will be perfect at once. There may also be elements that need to be tweaked. The main thing is to find the right balance between functionality and form in web design.
You should not only use the correct font and colors, but also understand how convenient and easy it is for your users to navigate the site.
The launch phase is far from complete — this must be remembered. When your site starts working, you can continuously launch content testing, track analytics and improve if there are any flaws.
Wrapping up
Summing up all mentioned above it is worth saying that web design process is really not so simple. Planning, creating content and visual design of the site really requires a lot of effort and ideas, but if you really want to get a good result and a great way to advertise and promote your business, then a quality website is exactly what you need.
Our design team can create the website of your dreams, which will definitely meet all standards and modern requirements. We propose a variety of different services, so website is not the only in which you might be interested in. You can visit UI/UX design services page to see the whole list.
Originally published at gapsystudio.com
