Design a Successful Website that Inspires you and your Clients

Undertaking a new web design is an important and exciting process that can significantly improve your company’s growth.

As the web is an ever-evolving medium, technology and user expectations continuously improve, thus making the role of web design more imperative than ever before. Getting the balance right between the visual impact and structuring components that guide that users behaviour is not an easy one.

Conducting Research

Creating a user-centric, lively and truly interactive web design not only draws on the expertise of the designer as a visual communicator but is a testament to amount of research the designer has undertaken.

Below are some of the key areas of research:

• Understanding the business – What services or products does the business offer? Will the new website provide access to a service, sell a product, entertain or simply instruct?  What is the future direction of the business? Where are the growth areas? What needs of the business does the website need to meet?
• Conducting user research – Who are the businesses customers? What determines their online behaviour? How do they use technology? How will they access the website? What are the customers’ demographics (age, gender, occupation, Income, location etc.)?
• Undertaking a competitor analysis – Who are the direct competitors? Who are the indirect competitors? What are their strengths? Where are they failing?
• Analysing the data of the current website – Where are your users coming from? What actions are users taking? How long are people staying on the site for?

From here the designer can form a clear understanding of the website needs that will define the creative direction.

Strategic Design

Depending on the complexity of the website, the designer may create wireframes and/or a prototype. These are used to visually show the site structure, content and interactions of the website.

Once the prototype is tested and refined, the web designer moves onto the fun part, the visual design! Each web designer will have their own way of sourcing inspiration, whether it’s visiting social media platforms like Pintrest or Instagram, looking through web design galleries, skimming through classic graphic design books or even taking a walk outside and noticing the details of a building.

From here the designer will determine the concept and begin working on the user interface. Generally a web designer will design for desktop first and work down to tablet and mobile, however there may be a business case to design mobile first (e.g. most website traffic is coming from mobile devices). When designing responsive websites it is imperative to give proper attention to optimising the design for each device.

To give you an idea of the considerations and decisions the designer makes during the process:

• Typography – What font to use? How does that font render on different browsers? Is it easy to read? What size should the font be? How wide can a paragraph be to be easily digested by a user?
• Colour – Is the contrast between colours strong enough? Are the colours competing with one another? Do the colours entice the feeling they are meant to achieve? How will different cultures interpret the colour choice?
• Call to actions, buttons and links – Are they legible and easy to understand? Do they stand out enough? How will they look when the user hovers over them? How do they work on tablet and mobile where there is no hover state?
• White space – Does everything look balanced? Is there enough space around the important elements so that they stand out enough?
• Branding – Is the design consistent with the businesses current branding? Does the design convey the intended look and feel of the business?
• Images – Are all the images essential to the design, or is it just decoration? Are the images large enough to cater for retina screens?

Polish, Polish, Polish

Being Web Designers in Melbourne for over 11 years, here at JTB Studios we are adamant about going that extra 10%. Throughout the process the designers collaborate, critique and analyse the design to ensure the solution is tight. And just when the designer thinks they are finished, it’s time to polish. We do this to ensure a truly personalised custom design for the client and ensure we are always pushing the boundaries of web design.

At the end of the day the investment is about the results.

Businesses find that after spending the right amount of time and money on their website, it has doubled their turnover.

To see how a better designed and developed website in Melbourne can really make a difference to your engagement and conversion, book a free consultation with one of our Senior Strategists.