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As a Vancouver-based web design company of over 9 years, we’ve gotten to streamline our website design process quite a bit. Here are nine quick tips to ensure your web design is streamlined, strategic and impactful to your business:
1. Draft A Creative Brief
The first step we present before undertaking any website project is drafting the creative brief. This is a document that we send each of our clients to fill out before working on any strategy. Some questions that we ask in the creative brief include “What are your business goals in the next 2 years?” and “What do your customers like about your brand?”
The goal of the creative brief is to identify some of the strengths and opportunities that we’ll leverage to create a website that is customized to your brand and customer expectations.
Before you undertake any website project, we recommend that you do the same to keep your brand in mind, and stay strategic.
2. Create A Sitemap
Once the business goals are outlined for the project, we want to tie them to specific pages on your website.
A sitemap is a document that outlines each page of your webpage. With our development process, we also take the necessary steps to ensure each page plays a specific role in your business funnel.
When reviewing your sitemap, ask yourself: what’s the purpose of this page?
If you’re spending time creating extra pages without any specific goal in mind, maybe you should reconsider the page altogether.
3. Review The Copy Separately
Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up with the bells and whistles of a new website. As lovely as your new website may seem, don’t let the new layout distract you from ensuring that critical pieces of content are not missed.
When creating a new website, we draft all copy in a separate document where our clients can see exactly where critical content goes, what’s being said, and how the user journey is broken down into a logical structure.
4. Review The Website As Wireframes
During the wireframe stage of our web design process, we present each page of the new site in “wireframe form”. This is presented in a black-and-white format, with only the main copy identified in the headers. Extra copy on the page is sometimes represented with Lorem Ipsum (placeholder text).
Note that copy and design aren’t the primary focus at the Wireframe stage.
The purpose of the wireframe stage is for you to review the structure of the website, to ensure that the user experience makes logical sense for your business.
5. Review The Customer Journey
If you’ve filled in the creative brief, you should already have a pretty good idea of what the customer/user journey looks like. While your website is in development, especially in the Wireframe stage, your #1 question should be “how is the user journey affected by these changes?”
If you’re used to using a Request A Sample form to generate leads, is the call-to-action clear on the new site? Will old customers become confused? It’s important to draw attention to any changes in the customer journey earlier in the process, rather than later.
If you’re working with a marketing agency, their responsibility will be to ensure your interests are fully represented in the new site. We welcome your feedback with open arms – feel free to add your comments!
6. Provide Comparative Feedback
Your marketing agency should be skilled enough to build you a high-quality, responsive website…but is that enough? These days, “high quality” and “response” aren’t a competitive advantage – they’re a baseline standard to creating great websites.
Each of our clients have various preferences, and it’s of great importance that we understand where you’re coming from. During the brainstorming process, we’ll ask you about websites you like, as well as websites you don’t like.
By understanding where your preferences lie, we’ll have a better idea of how to build your website. So, let us know! Which websites do you like? What makes you go “wow”?
7. Check In Often
We provide a dedicated project manager to ensure that you’re always updated in terms of where we’re at with your new website. If you ever find yourself saying “huh, it’s been a while since I heard about the new site, what’s going on?” that’s a potential problem area.
With smooth projects, there shouldn’t be a need to check in too often. But, if you’re having trouble communicating with your web developer, perhaps it’s time to give them a call to see how things are going.
8. Be Prepared To Work
Some of our clients are surprised when we ask them for content, copy or feedback.
There’s no magic bullet when it comes to content creation and website design – creating an excellent website requires two-way communication. While you can trust us to craft smart, SEO-optimized content, ultimately you are the expert in your industry and a responsible agency will do well to gain your two cents on a regular basis.
Be prepared to go through many rounds of approval – these regular touchpoints provide the feedback we need in order to ensure your new site fits your needs.
9. Ensure You Have An SEO Transition Plan
The worst fear for any SEO is a website launch without the proper preparations. Share on XNever launch a new website without an SEO transition plan; the repercussions of poor planning can not only stifle business growth, but can possibly eradicate all progress you’ve made for SEO improvement.
(If that statement sounds scary, well, it should be!)
Imagine if you had a URL on your site like /new-customer where you listed all relevant product-related information for potential new customers. When launching your new website, you moved all related content to a new /faq page.
If you didn’t implement the proper “301 redirects,” you’ve essentially lost all traffic that used to flow to the /new-customer page. The inbound links from other websites, the organic traffic from Google, direct traffic to the page, all gone! This is why your marketing provider should have a tried-and-true marketing process for all projects, from website design to SEO.
In Conclusion
If you want to make sure your SEO isn’t jeopardized by a poor website launch process, make sure that your web developer understands the SEO process and has worked with website launches before.
Better yet – hire a marketing agency to make sure that your website launch is smooth from start to finish. We hope that these 9 quick web design tips will help shed some light on important subjects. If you found any of the tips intriguing and want to learn more about website design, feel free to contact our marketing agency in Vancouver!