How to Create a High-Quality Website Design?

When creating a high-quality website, it is important to have a purpose, plan, robust structure & architecture, design

and development, and perform quality check, marketing and maintenance of the site.

For someone who is new to the world of Internet, the quantity of choices available on the platform can be bewildering. Other concerns such as costs, ROI and reliability may also worry some. However, one cannot deny the numerous benefits a properly created website design can bring to you and your business.

When you plan to get your own website, you have to ensure that the design and development processes are robust and enhance the user experience. Taking professional help of a website designer or web developer may prove helpful in creating a high-quality website design. Discussed below are some of the steps that you must take care of while creating a useful website design:

1) Have a reason for having a website- Creating a website for your business is no child’s play. If you are

not serious about your website, don’t even think of creating it because it is not going to bring you any

benefits, and would instead waste your time and energy. Before you begin with the design, think about

whether you really want to do this because a website design that enhances user experience requires a

lot of time and commitment. If you are unable to create a website that isn’t user-friendly, your visitors

might never return to your website.

2) Planning- Once you have assured that you definitely need a website to propagate your business and to

facilitate its growth, the planning process has to begin. In the planning stage, you have to determine

the purpose and goal of the website, your collateral needs, the target audience, resources available,

type of content to be used and performance indicators to be used to determine success. A clear vision

of your website design project can help you in the long run and bring positive results.

3) Working on the structure and architecture of the website- After you have a plan with you, it is

important to work on the information architecture for the website. The structure and architecture of

the site has to be created, tested and verified, and documentation of each process has to be done in

order to stay on track.

4) Design- When the purpose, planning and architecture of the website are done, the actual design

process begins. In website design, user-centric approach has to be adopted in order to understand the

business, economic, environmental, social and other requirements of the users. Too often, a website

design is just considered to be a visual problem that is solved with the help of a graphic designer.

However, web design is way more than just visual appeal. A successfully designed website enriches the

user experience and has ample call to action messages that entices the users to take a positive action.

When designing a site, it is important to integrate some key factors in it, including-

a) The basic principles of web design

b) Making it accessible for everybody

c) Testing the design

5) Development- Once the design has been worked upon, the role of a web developer comes into play.

Whether you do it yourself, or hire a professional web developer, the programming and development

processes have to be carried out with great expertise. The development process creates the

foundation of the website and makes it technically sound and functional. The developer must choose

the script languages that would enhance the functioning of the site. He/ she must choose a suitable

document type, use HTML elements according to their semantics, write structured code and get used

to coding guidelines, and validate everything.

6) Quality check- Quality is of prime importance in a website. Before you launch your website, it is

important to perform quality assurance in order to detect any flaws or loopholes and fix them up

before the site goes live. For best results, it is important to perform quality checks at each step of

designing the website. Test the cross-browser compatibility of the site, its load time, accessibility and

every other aspect in order to ensure value-added user experience.

7) Marketing- The web developer should use HTML that is suitable for search engines in terms of

semantics and accessibility. Implement search engine marketing and optimisation strategies in your

web design to market the site and your business to a wider audience.

8) Maintenance- Just creating a high-quality website is not the end of the task. Internet is a dynamic

platform and the search engines keep upgrading them from time-to-time. In order to stay ahead of the

competition it is important to adapt to the changing Web environment. This is why maintenance of the

website has to be done at frequent intervals.

Sigma InfoTech Level 8, 33 York Street, Sydney NSW, Australia - 2000

Tel: 1300782023 Fax: 1300 79 44 02

E-mail: sales@sigmainfotech.com.au http://www.sigmainfotech.com.au/websitedesign.htm