The website design process with Expert

At Expert our website design process is broken into 5 stages:

Stage 1: Website Design Briefing
Stage 2: Website Structure Design
Stage 3: Website Concept Design
Stage 4: Website Build
Stage 5: Website Testing and Training

In this article we cover stage 1; Website Design Briefing.

Client home work

As a client there are a few steps you may want to take before giving your brief to our creative team.

Work out your needs

Working out what you, your organisation, business and audience needs from the website is an important step. It will help to give you a clear view of what your website should be, how it should function and why. It will also help when working out your budget and getting an accurate quote. You don’t need all the answers and our staff can help you define all your website needs.

Evaluate your resources

Knowing things like:

• Your budget?
• Where you can get your logos and corporate styles from?
• Do you have an image library? Are you willing to buy images? Or pay for photography?
• Who and how many people will be working on updating your site? Do they understand code?
• Who will be writing the website content?  Will you pay for an SEO writer, or get it done in-house?

Knowing the answers to these questions will be an advantage to you and the designer. With this information, the designer can design to meet your specification while keeping all the issues in mind. You can also have your resources ready before they are needed, making sure time lines move quickly and smoothly.

Define your audience and users

At Expert we have a 'creative brief' document that will help you to define your audience and users. Make sure you are able to answer questions like “Who is the primary audience using this website?” and “How would you describe these users?”.

Set your goals

What will the website do for your organisation or business? Is it marketing focused, sales focused, or about providing better services to professional members?

Particular functionality / requirements

Expert has a range of tools available, including event management, web to SMS, database emailing, online shopping, and image galleries, to name a few. Any particular requirements should be assessed on a basis of required and desired aspects.

Once you have considered who will build and maintain the website, who will be using it and why, along with what you expect to get out of it in the long term, you should feel confident to work with one of our designers.

Quote

We will work with you on a quote. This may change over time as we work together to ensure you get the most out of your website and identify additional requirements, or eliminate unnecessary aspects. The purpose of this quote will be to confirm the necessary aspects of your website project, and their associated costs. By doing this, we can ensure that the cost and benefit of each aspect can be identified. Through the quotation process, we will also establish a time line with deadlines for each stage of the project.

Creative brief

The purpose of this brief is to enable our designers to establish parameters and interpret your requirements into a visual form. We provide you with a briefing document will a list of questions for you to fill out, such as:

• Who is the primary audience using this website?
• How would you describe these users?
• Demographics of the primary audience
• Are images necessary for this website?
• How long is the site expected to last?

There may be questions that you have already answered, however we urge you to give our designers time as they will be looking at your requirements from a designer’s perspective.

Creative meeting

This meeting provides both yourself and our designer with the opportunity to ask questions that may not have been covered in the creative brief. This brings us to Stage two, Structure design.

Our staff will work to ensure that each aspect and stage of your website development is explained to you clearly. Through the processes mentioned in this article, we will work to ensure that your website is a strong tool for your business / organisation, developed in a manner best fitting with your immediate and long-term goals.

To contact our team, just leave a message at the bottom of this blog, including your email address / phone number, and we will be in touch.

At Expert we don't just specialise in aesthetic website design, we design websites with strong usability and navigation. Find out more about Expert's website design process.

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