The website design process with Expert

At expert our website design process is broken up 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 3; Website Design and Mock-ups.

At Expert we think of this as the fun stage. It’s where we make your website come to life after all the planning and documentation. Finally some colour and images!

At this stage (if you haven’t already) Expert will ask you to provide your logo, any branding or style guides along with images you may have. Please provide our designers with as much as you can so that they will have the best material to work with on your website design.

Website Concept

During the quotation process, our sales team will have worked with you on how many different concepts our design team would provide for you to choose from. Our designers can show you from just one concept though to as many as you are willing to pay for. Typical projects usually only require 1 concepts, while sites that require a higher level of differentiation will require more design concepts. The end product of these concepts is typically an amalgamation of each concept.

In the creative meeting and briefing document you will have answered questions about the websites visual design or provided Expert with examples of websites that you like. These ideas are now interpreted by our talented designers. They will work on the concepts until you will have the best website design possible. They will then create mock-ups of each concept for you to view and choose from.

Website Mock-up

Mock-ups are a realistic (to scale) static graphic representation of the website’s home page and chosen internal pages. They help make clear which information goes where and which colours or images will be used. By using the wireframe as a guide Expert will design a mock-up of your website interface, by adding dummy text (or the real text if you can provide it to us), colour and graphics. Some adjustments to the wireframe layout may be made to improve the websites look or functionality.

How is this different to the wireframe? The wireframe is a planning tool to show the physical layout (what goes where), while mock-ups are more about the design (look and feel) without the working functionality.

Review, improvements and changes

This review, improvements and changes step gives you the opportunity to provide feedback on the mock-ups, or design aspects you feel best meet the functional and aesthetic requirements of your organisation. It also allows changes and improvements to be made easily before the website build. If you have more than one set of mock-ups, you may find you prefer one concept over the other, or you may wish to combine aspects of several. Expert will provide you with two rounds of review, improvements and changes to your chosen set of Mock-ups.

We suggest you take your time to fully assess the design, based upon the images and briefings you provided.

Aspects Expert recommend you consider are:

• Who is the primary audience of this website?
• What is the purpose for using this website?
• How will the audience be interacting with the website (functionality)?
• Does the design convey the personality, direction and goals of your organisation?

At this point you will need to keep in mind that the design concepts are only mock-ups and none of the buttons or links will work and that most of the text may be dummy text or a suggestion.

Once you are satisfied that all your changes have been made, Expert will ask you to sign off on the concepts mock-ups. We then get on with Stage 4 and Build your website.

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 blog, 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.

Here 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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