Designing a website can be simple.

But designing an effective site that helps you actually grow your business? That’s a lot harder. Unless you have the right web design agency at your side. 

With the right team, you can boast a search-engine optimised website that encourages client/customer loyalty and helps you grow your business. 

And it only takes 3 steps. 

How do professional web design agencies build websites that convert?

Let’s find out!

1. The Plan

Planning out your website design is one of the most exciting parts of the process. When designing a website, especially if your business is new to having a digital presence, the possibilities are endless.

But this is where a reputable web design agency comes in.

Hiring a web design company can enable you to make long-term financial savings by building a website swiftly and effectively, lowering your overhead expenses. They will consider exactly what features your website will need, and will optimise your site to make upkeep and updating easier for you - helping you avoid costly errors.

Of course, this will require having a thorough understanding of your business needs.

The initial meeting between the designer and customer is vital for the agency to thoroughly grasp the difficulties faced by the user and to establish the common objectives. 

Your website's objective, competitors, recipients (and their expectations and requirements) should all be established as soon as possible. 

It is also crucial to record these details as you go over them, so that you and your designers are on the same page at each stage of the planning, design and implementation process. 

A key part of the planning phase is deciding which website platform is the most suitable for your needs. Our team of skilled web designers and developers in Manchester work across the full range of codes bases and platforms including WordPress, Magento, Laravel and Concrete5. So whether you are building an ecommerce website, a lead generation website, recruitment website or a custom solution for something more advanced, Visionsharp can help make your vision a reality.

For those of you who currently have a website, these considerations can be used to assess its performance and identify potential areas for new website traffic-boosting strategies.

After these facts and goals have been established, it's time to get stuck in - the designing has now started! 

Here, the designer starts to develop ideas while keeping the objectives and scope in mind, creating sketches, mood boards, wireframes, etc. Based on preliminary client feedback, the designer will create a few basic ideas and concepts to choose from. 

2. The Execution

This is where the coding starts. The wireframes are recreated by the developer, while the designer adds UI improvements and offers functional criticisms, with motion and aesthetics taking centre stage.

The goal of UI design is to focus on your site's visual appeal. Meanwhile, the UX design process will ensure that your customers can swiftly understand, navigate and use your site.

This will involve plenty of testing. In order to perform user research, prototypes are employed. 

Some issues to think about are:

  • What aspects of this design do people appreciate or dislike?
  • Where does the user's focus tend to linger?
  • Is the user confused by any aspect of the design or workflow?

You can iterate on the design and construction once all of the feedback has been gathered and reviewed. Additionally, this is a good time to look for bugs in the code that led to user experiences that were not intended.

Do not forget that a successful design process does not stop with your "final version!" Your users will ultimately inform you when and if you've reached the "final version." Before creating a steady product with lasting appeal, you might need to repeat this process several times.

For example, making sure that your website is optimised for Google should be a top priority for your web design team. 

A website can be optimised for Google PageSpeed using a number of best practises. These include using caching to speed up website performance, cropping images more efficiently, minifying code, and enhancing web font loading times.

The performance of a website can also be enhanced by reducing image size. To do this, an image optimisation programme can be used to compress an image while maintaining its quality.

Another technique for enhancing website performance is code minification. To decrease the size and speed up the page, this requires deleting any extraneous characters from the code, such as whitespace and comments.

Finally, reducing the time it takes for web fonts to load can help websites perform better. The use of web fonts that are designed to load quickly can achieve this.

But even after your website has launched, there is still plenty of work that can (and should) be done to help you stand out against competitors and reap the full benefits of your site.

3. Review, improve, repeat

The process of designing a new website continues even after its launch. The first thing you might need to do is fix any new issues or strange behaviour that have appeared after your site went live. 

From there, both your users' needs and the best practices for web design will likely evolve with time. Making a roadmap of your website's probable future stages can help to keep your business one step ahead of the competition.

Meanwhile, if you want to draw in more customers, increasing the exposure of your website with the aid of a reputable web design company is crucial. For optimal exposure, they can build an SEO-friendly website and integrate it with your business' social media pages. Additionally, they can help you to produce excellent content that will make you stand out from your competition.

While we have simplified the process down to its 3 basic building blocks, the beauty of web design is that it can be as simple or as complex as you desire. The most important thing is that you make an ongoing commitment to your clientele/ customer base.

Designing your perfect website requires iterative feedback, analysis, brainstorming, and implementation. 

The key to success is making sure there is a design workflow where all stakeholders are aligned and working together to reach your clearly established milestones.

As a trusted Manchester-based web design agency, we know that the key to optimising your website's design lies not just in the 3 steps outlined above, but also in our ability to understand your business needs and communicate with you every step of the way.

For purpose-driven design & development solutions from one of the UK's most innovative web design agencies, see our flexible payment options and contact us today.