StripyEye

Branding
A website not only reflects your other marketing materials i.e. logo, business cards, corporate identity, etc., but also how you project your professional presence in the market place, how you conduct your overall business, from responding to enquiries to the content on your site, therefore a website is only as good as your marketing.

For example using clip art for a logo or business cards, does not project a professional organisation, this goes hand in hand with how you present your self online. If your company is in this position, it would be wise to take a step back, and allocate more time to develop these other areas first.

Market place
As with corporate identity and branding, it’ important to have an understanding of your business, target audience and more importantly competitors, as a means of research, to better conceive how your website will stand out or fit in to the market. This can be of particular importance if you’ve recently undergone major restructuring, purchasing or starting a new business.

Architecture
Planning is the aspect that will take the longest, even months, before you can really begin to design the visual framework of a website. The thought process pre-design can be the most revealing, how you perceive yourself in the market place, the structure of your company, what your history has been, and can be quite a revelation should you wish to delve that deep, but can be an extremely rewarding process, if difficult at times.

Once you’ve gone through that, you need to think about features and sections your website requires, this is the organisation of information, how you’d like the viewer to navigate through the site, and thinking about the flexibility of these sections in future, as a website should never remain static, but continue to blossom with new and interesting content. Sketching out a brief flow plan, is a great way to process your ideas for these structural areas.

Responsive design
With the impact of smartphones and tablets, the importance of responsive design has now become a necessity, therefore it’s imperative to think about designing for smaller screens, I would suggest this be the first thing that’s tackled then the desktop.

The aesthetic of any design work is the end result, and how it’s conceived in the mid of the viewer, first impression can have a big impact. The look is important, but if this isn’t cohesive with navigating and intuitive design, then it soon becomes style over substance, It should be aesthetically pleasing and have an intuitive framework of navigation that compels the user to explore further.