Vel Murugan S

“Create website in just 2 mins”, “Drag and drop your website”. These are all the advertisements, you could have been seen every day. Have you ever thought of what are all the steps involved behind a launch of successful website; A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE. With hands-off experience of 4+ years into web development projects, I would like to spare my time by explaining various process involved in designing a successful website. Let me start with the first stage that’s “Competitor Analysis”.

1. Competitor Analysis

Just like all business, process of designing a website starts with in-depth analysis of competitor’s website. In this stage we have to arise questions like:
1. What are all the information competitors have given in their website?
2. How do they have focused on user experience?
3. How do they have highlighted their product/service?
4. How do they have conveyed trustworthiness of their concern?
5. What converts the visitors into positive leads?
6. The usage of color schemes

Once we note down correct answers for all the above questions, we will be able to start
filtering-out information we should give in our website.

2. Wireframing

Now we are ready with topics that should be shown in our website. Its time to focus on the best possible way to showcase the information. Its one of the crucial part of web designing. As our ultimate target will be conversion of visitors into leads, we should concentrate on user experience in this stage.

User experience is nothing other than the way a visitor experience our website. A good user experience will lead to:
A visitor understand what the website is and he gets information of what he/she was expecting from the website without any difficulties.

Well, lets move into wireframing. Wireframe is just a hand drawn sketch of our website. A good wireframe will convey what a client expects from his website. With a wireframe, one can easily explain the website’s core functionality and how its gonna achieve its goal.

3. Optout a suitable color scheme

Wireframe of a website can be compared with drawing of a construction project. Its time to think about look and feel of our website. Look and feel starts with choosing color scheme for our website. In most of the cases client used to have a logo for their business. A designer will analyze the logo colors and business category. Now he will suggest good color scheme for further design of that website. www.colorlovers.com can be a better tool to choose a right color scheme for our website.

4. Mock-up Design

The foundation has been made for the website development. Yeah! Now we are clear with what we are gonna show in ourwebsite and the best matching colors schemes for our website. Its time to start designing the visual appearance of thewebsite. We used to call this as mockup design. Most of the designers search for inspirational designs from which they will be able to get ideas to fill colors for their creativity. From where they get these website links? If google was your guess, you are completely wrong. Google analyze content of a website rather than look and feel of it. Then who lights on designer’s creative eye? There are amply of online galleries in internet. Few of them are www.cssmania.com, www.awwwards.com, www.CSSwinners.com and so on…

Once a designer get enough design ideas, he will straight away start working on design tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks.

5. Front-end conversation:

Mock-up design that was finalized in the previous process is like a pictorial representation of our website. Its time to think of coding part of our website. Coding work can be classified into front-end development and back-end development.

Front-end development is the process of converting a design into browser understandable code. Core part of computer knows just two numbers 0,1. Just like that your internet browser knows only one markup language which is none other than HTML.

In addition with HTML, CSS (Cascade Style Sheet) is used to empower our website with crispy styles. JavaScript is used to accomplish user interactions from the client side.

6. Back-end development:

Have you ever think of what’s happening once you enter username, password and hit enter button? A lot many verification, filtration , fetch need to be done. This is what a back-end developer’s role will be. He will be taking part of all server side scripting works. Languages like php, .net, jsp will be used depends on the kind of website you are developing.www.w3schools.com will be the right place to start learning the above mentioned scripting languages.

7. QA Testing:

We are almost ready. But no one can work 100% accurate. There could have been careless mistakes, spell errors, browser incompatibility and lot more issues in our project. That means, our work is not yet ready to go live. Its time to quality check our website. QA team will check our website from multiple angles like User Experience, Flow of navigation, Functionality flow and lot more. Once QA team approves our project we can launch our website and start promoting it.

Conclusion:

I believe that you have got a oral idea about the flow of a website designing project. Please consider sharing this with your friends and post your valuable thoughts in the discussion board below.