Web Design

Website visitors are increasingly sophisticated when it comes to navigating websites and will quickly speak with their feet (or mouse) if they don’t like the way a website is designed. In order to create a successful web design, there are a few key considerations that should always be taken into account:

User Experience – Focusing on user experience, or UX design, at the outset will ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of having a site that puts design gimmicks over and above functionality. The sister of UX design is UI design, or user interface design, which looks at the detailed aspects of web page design and how the user interacts with them.

Search Engine Optimisation – These days it isn’t just website users that you need to consider when designing a site, as it is equally important to factor in search engine optimisation (SEO) to your planning process. Thinking through keywords and search terms at this stage will feed into the structure of the site and pay dividends when the site goes live.

Brand Integrity – Last, but by no means least, you need to consider your overall brand style and make sure that your website dovetails with other aspects of your marketing activity. Consistency is one of the most important elements of branding, and today’s consumers expect high standards of brand integrity if they are going to remain as loyal customers.

What is Wireframing? – Website wireframing is a tried and tested process which allows us to mock up the layout of each page on the website, without the need for time consuming design work. It allows us to present a skeleton of the website’s layout and structure to the client before committing any time to development. This process is surprisingly effective at delivering a low fidelity representation of how the website will look and enabling the client to understand our vision for the website. The wireframes form the foundations for the website build and are a document that we constantly refer back to during the design process.

Website Design Concepts – Following sign off, we move on to the branded designs, using colour, fonts and imagery to bring the blueprint to life. This is usually the stage that clients enjoy the most, as they see the website taking shape and can start to visualise what the end product will look like. Unless there is a clear design route to follow, we would normally produce several different homepage design concepts for the client to choose from, before moving on to the pages for the rest of the site.

Website Page Designs – We don’t design every page on the website, but we do design every page that follows a different layout. We also create design layouts for the different views of the website across desktop, tablet and mobile devices to ensure it will work for responsive web design. Creating these designs in interactive software like Adobe XD allows us to produce a working prototype that the client can explore to ensure they are happy with the website from every angle.