A website is one of the most valuable assets of any digital marketing strategy. Without a reliable, well-structured and SEO-focused website, a business won't achieve its goals. It's, therefore, natural that a web design agency would find creating and designing a brand new website for their clients challenging. But it's not just the pressure of designing a website; rather its the process.

The process of web designing has become complicated for many companies, as designers don’t optimize their processes. Many are stuck in their old routines, which take up too much time and multiple revisions. What should seem like a straightforward process turns into a daunting task, even for the most experienced designers.

Optimizing and simplifying the process increases the efficiency in which you operate manage your website designs, saving you time and money while improving your output. Here is how you can go about doing it.

6 Steps To Optimize Your Web Design Process  

Step 1: Communicate Openly With Your Client

The quintessential part of every web design process is client debrief. You cannot make any plans or start any projects without having a firm idea on what your client wants. But what’s worse is when your clients don’t know either!

So how do you reach a middle point with them? How do you avoid problems down the line? Simple: you ask the key questions. With the right questions, you will get the correct answers; helping you establish guidelines of your web design plan. Here are some key questions that you can build around:

● How do you expect the website to achieve your business goals?

● Who is your target audience?

● What feel and flow do you want for your website?

● Are you planning on taking advantage of SEO?

● How easy do you want to navigate through your website?

Most importantly, make sure you entice them to elaborate on what they need and pay close attention to everything they have to say. You should also note down any particular issues you might have with the website design during this time.

Step 2: Streamline Your Research

Now with a base point on what your client wants, you can start the next phase: researching the website design to create your clients’ new site. You should begin to audit competitors, getting ideas from similar website structures and styles from similar brands, and start to compile a list (bookmark it if you have too!).

Once you have collected everything you need, start eliminating the worse ones and focus on the websites that will work for your clients’ goals and design interests.

Step 3: Create The Blueprint

Website blueprints, or wireframes, will have all the relevant elements for the website’s visual structure. It is here that you should only focus on creating an empty site - without the other aspects (it’s just time-consuming if you do).

Using the information you gathered from your client, and coupled with the ideas you’ve researched, you can create a blueprint that will contain all the vital elements of the live site. It should include the structure, flow, call-to-actions, functionality, photo spaces and content boxes. With these ‘set’ elements, you can slowly build the remaining website on top of it. This will help streamline your web design blueprint phase.

It also effectively improves your client approach, as you can make changes to the wireframe when your client sees it. As opposed to complete website changes when the site is up, adjusting the wireframe is easier.

Step 4: Stylizes The Website

With an approved blueprint, it is time to add the stylistic parts of the website, including fonts, colours, logos, and specific interface elements. You can apply your client’s ongoing branding strategy on top of the site, creating your first official skin of the website.

You don’t need to focus on the little details, but rather the broader picture. Once you have the skin of the website, send it to the client so they can approve it. From there, changes - just like the blueprint phase - will be quick and easy to do, as the main components are already there.  

Step 5: Create The Prototype

With the skin of your website complete, you can now use your web design tool and create the prototype. The creation process will now be faster as you have the skin and blueprint already. You can even do A/B testing for the site to make sure it functions correctly.

Step 6: Complete Review

Finally, conduct a complete review of the website. Run tests, check functionality and tests forms to see if everything is working as it should. You don’t want any mistakes when sending it to your client for the final review, so make sure that it’s as perfect as possible.

By optimizing these six steps, you can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your website design process. This will help your web design company manage an increase in work and being able to deliver better results for your clients.