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Starting a website can be daunting. How can we be sure to accurately represent the companies and businesses we are designing for? A Comprehensive Website Guide (parts 1 and 2) offers many different ways to get to know the company you are designing for and its intended audience. After all, reaching the intended audience is the goal of a website. The first step to understanding exactly what the website you are designing needs to do is to begin with a needs assessment. 

Needs Assessment and Intake Session

A needs assessment is the beginning of any website building project. This is, as Ben Seigal states, where you figure out where a business has been, where it’s going, and how you can get it there. This is where you begin to understand what a business needs in a website. From here, you can get into the intake session. An intake session is a lengthy meeting (Seigal states an intake session under 40 minutes is not sufficient enough) where you get into the nitty-gritty details of the company you are building a website for. In this session, you will discuss things like:

• The core details and values of the company
• Who the company is and what they do
• Target Audience 
• the intended purpose of the website 
• How the company would like to be perceived based on their website

This is only the surface of the types of questions you should ask during an intake session. You want to be able to understand the ins and outs of the company so that you can represent them effectively on their website. Since you will be the one conducting the meeting, you can set the tone. It can be formal or informal, either way, be sure to have a list of questions ahead of time. 

Starting the Project:

Milestones

After you have gotten all of the information you need to begin building your website, it’s time to start the project. Seigal states that one important step is to create milestones for the project. Milestones are dates you select to get things done by and the deliverables for each date. This can be applied to short-term and longer-term projects. Some examples of milestones would be 

• Day 1: Begin initial research of the business
• Day 7: Intake session
• Day 14: Show business initial ideas for the website

Assign Roles

Once you have gotten to the stage where you can start your project, you can begin to assign roles. Each role is unique and therefore requires certain skills and requirements. There are many different roles, such as:

• Project manager: this role is in charge of the entire project. They see to it that everyone else is doing their roles and that deadlines are being met. 
• Content creator: this role is in charge of creating content for the website. This can be in the form of written content, visual content, etc.
• Copywriter/editor: this role is responsible for writing copy that accurately reflects the company. The person doing this role may have to engage with the company further than just the intake session. They may have to interview key people within the company to create excellent written content for the website. 
• Web Designer: this role is all about the design of the website and the design of the user interface. They design the website from top to bottom, mapping out where all the content will go. 
• Coders (front end and back end): these are the people who are writing the code for the website and managing the content management system (CMS).

Content

One of the essential parts of the website besides functionality is the actual content of the website. The most important thing to remember when creating content for a website is the audience. What do we want the content to encourage a user to do? To purchase something? To book an appointment? To make a donation? The first step to creating content for a website is to determine where the content is going to go.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a tool to organize all of the content that will go on a website. A sitemap is essentially a flowchart of all of the content on a webpage and can be created on software such as Microsoft Visio and Gliffy. Essentially, the sitemap acts as a visual representation of all the pages and how they connect. 

Wireframes

A wireframe is the bare-bones layout of a website. It focuses solely on the content and how it will be arranged on the webpage. 

For more information on the difference between sitemaps and wireframes, check out this evolve article.

Website Content

Website content is much more than just written content. For example, content can be:

• Audio: such as podcasts, interviews, playlists
• Visual: such as photography, videos, artwork 
• Written: such as the copy written for the website, content from other sites such as twitter and facebook

Whatever the content, ensuring that it’s the highest quality the project can afford will only increase the overall quality of the website. Plus, the content of the website is what keeps the users engaged. If the website has bad photos, the chances of the user doing what the website creators want the user to do are much lower. 

Writing Content for Websites:

Much like what we’ve discussed in this class, website writing must be short, concise, and to the point. Seigal explains this process like this:

• Write your first draft
• Cut it in half
• Cut it in half again
• Now add bulleted and numbered lists where possible
• Keep your sentences short
• Use paragraph breaks whenever there’s a slight change of flow in the copy
• Send it to the editor.
• Create strong headlines
• Frame everything in terms of your customer 

We don’t want to weigh the user down with large blocks of text when we know that the user will likely skim for the information that applies to them. By breaking the text up into short paragraphs or bullet points, we know that the information will be easily digestible and therefore more appealing to the user. 

University of Maryland Baltimore has a quick and easy to read Best Practices guide for Web Writing. This source has an excellent list of things to remember while writing content for the web. For example, making sure to write with common language within the field your website will help with search engine optimization (SEO), which will help users find your website when googling certain phrases. Another important thing to consider when writing content for websites is to remember tone. Write in an upbeat, optimistic style, keeping it lighthearted but still professional. Write in an active voice, using first or second person. This will help make the reader and user feel not so weighed down when they are reading on your website.

Designing the website

Keep the business or company in mind at all times when you are designing the website. Brand is everything. Branding is the first thing a user thinks of when they think of a company, so creating a strong sense of a brand in a website will make your site successful. When it comes to the aesthetics of the website, be sure to plan around the logo of the company. This could mean implementing a specific color scheme, font choice, writing style, domain name, photography, and much more. When designing a website, you are essentially designing a company’s online brand, so do so with care. 

Responsive design

An important thing to remember when designing your website is what device the user is most likely to view your site on. Therefore, your website should be responsive. It should look good on mobile devices as well as large viewports such as a desktop. Different devices allow for different viewing experiences. Because of this, consider cutting or adding content depending on the viewport (the viewport is the dimensions of the screen, it determines how the website knows whether or not to be ‘mobile’ view or ‘desktop’ view). An example of this would be only showing the essential information in the mobile viewport since we can assume that people who are viewing a website on mobile may want a quicker user experience. On desktop, we can assume that the user might have more time, and therefore we can provide them with more information. 

When creating a responsive design, consider:

• The size of images and videos when moving between mobile and desktop
• Size of links and buttons 
• Size of charts

Essentially, make sure that when your content moves from desktop to mobile, an image doesn’t take up the user’s entire screen. It should look aesthetically pleasing but most of all be functional for the user. 

Conclusion

Whatever the scale of your website building project, these steps are vital to the overall success of your design. Organization is one of the most important things to remember while building a website, whether that be organization of content on a website or the organization of team members and deadlines. Perhaps the most important, though, is audience. Keeping our audience/user in mind at all parts of the design process is how we can be sure that we are building a website that, as Seigal says, suits their needs, fears, and desires.

Sources

The sources used to create this blog post were Ben Seigal’s A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide parts 1 and 2. University of Maryland Best Practices for Web Writing.