What is website design and why should it be done?

Designing - this is probably the key stage in the creation of a website; it answers us to the following questions:

1. What are our goals - why do we make a website? How do we realize our goals?
2. How will the site look and work?

About the benefits of design

Designing gives the site a lot:

1. Greatly enhances the guarantee of achievement.
   Only by clearly articulating the tasks, defining the target audience of the site and its needs, having modeled the interaction of the site and its users, we can be sure that we will get what we need.
2. Saves time and money.
   To correct a mistake at the design stage is quite simple: we change several pieces of text and diagrams. To do this at the design stage or layout will be more expensive. If the error is detected at the programming stage, its correction can cost many thousands (tens, hundreds of thousands) of rubles and take months, or even years.
3. Allows you to effectively share work.
   The design task is a completely self-contained document. Having received it, the client can do the site on his own or hire another team that, in his opinion, will better cope with the development directly (we have such experience when we only did the design, and the client developed the site on their own).

I would not recommend to neglect the design even for the smallest sites; For the most recent one-page business card it will be extremely useful. Spend at least a few days - you will not regret.

The exception, perhaps, are cheap sites - with a budget of 5-15 thousand rubles - where design becomes unprofitable, alas.

How to design a website

Design can be divided into four main parts:

1. Goal setting
2. Context study
3. Creating a concept
4. Modeling.

Goal setting

Targeting is necessary to determine why we are making the site and what kind of results we want to achieve. This serves as a guideline for all further work: whatever we do - be it modeling, creating interfaces, adding new functions, or changing old ones - all of this should be consistent with the goals.
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In the future, they also help assess the success of the project .

The first step in goal setting is made in the vision of the project . At the design stage, goals are formulated more accurately and in detail , and site objectives are defined, the implementation of which will work towards the achievement of each goal.

Context study

Research is necessary to obtain information that we will call the context of the site. By context we understand the various circumstances surrounding the site and that can have an impact on its work. These circumstances include:

• Target audience and its needs,
• Characteristics and trends of the area
• Competitors and their activities,
• Experience other projects
• Legislative or other restrictions
• Other factors of influence, depending on the subject of the project.

The benefits of context research

The context of the project helps us to understand the target audience and how the site should be made: how to position it, what information should be in it and what language it should speak to Central Asia (this is called a communicative strategy), how it will differ from competitors (of course, in the best way).

In addition, the study immerses the project team in the subject, allows somewhere even at a subconscious level to see / make the right decisions.

Best of all, of course, the study helps to understand the audience:

• How to communicate with her: what words to use in “conversation” with her, how to name your product or service (you may need to use professional slang, or vice versa, deliberately simplified terminology), whether you should refer to it on “you” or on “you” .
• What are its needs : what is a priority, what is optional, but desirable, what cannot be done in any case.

Where to get data

Ideally, we should receive data on the context from the client, but if the client does not have such data, then the context will have to be examined by ourselves.

For research, I advise you to use two methods that have proven best for all the projects we have done without exception:

• Research available sources - literature, online resources and so on.
• Interviews with key actors - users, experts.

I foresee comments: they say, independent research did not stand next to professional marketing research - so why waste time and resources? There are several reasons for this:

• Without context data, your chances of doing well to the user tend to zero.
• Even self-study provides useful information, albeit to a lesser extent than professional.
• And even if you are so ineptly conducting a study (which is unlikely) that you cannot get answers to the above questions, you will still be immersed in the context of the project and at least subconsciously pick up something useful.

I can tell from my own experience: research has always helped us, in any project.

Creating a site concept

Excellent: goals set, context data received. It's time to clothe all the available information in the concept (the analogue of what we did in the vision, but more detailed). Let me remind you that by concept we understand the main ideas and opportunities inherent in the project:

• What and for whom we are doing - the general idea and the target audience;
• How the site will work and what information to contain;
• How the site will earn (if it is a project with direct monetization);
• What will be the distinctive features of the site (from competitors), how it will be positioned;
• How the site will develop after launch.

The concept sets the direction for the design and helps, similar to the vision, to reconnect the points of view on the project - ours and the client.

Site modeling

Modeling is the creation of a site model that describes the functionality and information structure.

The functional part of the model

In the functional part of the model, we describe the possibilities that the site provides to its users: for example, upload, group and comment on photos (social network) or order and pay for goods (online store). It is important to understand that opportunities are tools for solving problems. If the invented opportunity does not solve any of the problems - this may mean that it is superfluous. In the design task, we describe the capabilities at a sufficiently high level of abstraction - not as detailed as we will do in the “Programming Assignment”, since it is simply not required here.

Information structure

The information structure is a diagram showing which sections the site consists of, what tasks they solve, and how the user will navigate the site (navigation diagram).

Next, we are working through a section scheme - this is a more deeply and detailed scheme (compared to the information structure of the site), showing the navigation through the section, links and transitions between subsections. The partition scheme ideally includes the following elements:

• Tasks - which of the previously assigned tasks the section solves. For example, the section “Photos” in a social network solves the problem of information exchange between friends and subsequent communication;
• Messages are literally messages that a section or part of it passes to a visitor. For example, the greeting message “Hello, you are on the portal XXX! We are glad to see you here ”or“ Hey, this is our best product - try, order now and see for yourself! ”.
  Messages come in different types; The most frequently encountered: advertising, calls to action, notifications and image messages.
• Functional elements - interface elements that enable the visitor to perform some kind of operation. For example, the functional element is a form for entering a message that allows you to send a message, or a button in the interface that saves the changes made.
• Variants of visitor behavior - assumptions that the visitor can or should do after studying the interface or its individual parts.

We usually make such schemes in the form of mind maps - very convenient, I must say.

Summary

As usual, brief conclusions:

1. Be sure to design any site. If you do not know how, then it's time to start learning.
2. Design is useful: it improves the quality of the site, saves time and money.
3. Design is, first of all, the correct formulation of the problem, and then the research, conceptual and engineering modeling arising from it.

PS: This article is obviously a review, for starters, since it is unrealistic to disclose the design topic in one article. Virtually any thought from this article was repeatedly confirmed by our personal experience, and we will tell about everything later, in more detail and with examples.

If this article seemed useful to you, write down in the comments about what design stages you would like to know more.