Do you feel lost when it comes to Web design? You don’t need to be an expert on HTML, Ruby or other programming languages to end up with an effective design for your ecommerce website. You can use Submit Solution’s custom-design services to handle the actual design part.
But there are four steps you can take before you go to the experts to make sure your site does precisely what you want it to. These steps come from an Examiner article entitled, “Website design starter plan for clients.” That article has horrible spelling and grammar, but it has a few good ideas I want to share, so I’ll cut its author a little slack.
Anyway, here are the four steps you should take before requesting help from a Web designer:
1. Look at what your competitors are doing. Plagiarism is illegal, but finding good practices and Web-design ideas is perfectly legal. This will give you a good starting point to see which elements of a website you would like to use in your own. Try to stick to general ideas, such as navigation, structure and what subjects are covered in the text.
2. Once you have an idea of what others are doing, start mapping out your website’s outline. Start with the main pages, such as home, services, products, about us, etc. Then add subpages under the main pages to build on more specific topics. Fill in as much detail as you can about what information and messages you want those pages to contain. This will help the designers be more precise in meeting your needs.
3. Write down other tools you want to include in your website. If you want to add tutorials or other videos to your site, you should mention that you’ll need a media player in your site outline. Depending on your needs, you might consider adding any number of specialized tools to your site, such as forums, blogs, audio, etc. Make sure whatever you add actually helps visitors and doesn’t distract from your site’s overall theme.
4. Create an overall theme for your website. This includes color schemes, logo, content placement and more. Like a wedding, a website needs to have its colors chosen ahead of time to make sure everything matches and works well together. Having a strong logo is a good starting point in creating your design and, once again, Submit Solution’s logo-design services can come in handy.
When you’re armed with research and a plan, you can confidently approach a designer to begin building your website. Some of your plans might have to wait because of budget concerns or other reasons, but you will definitely have a much stronger final product than if you went into the design process with no preparation.
This is a complete version of the post on the eHarbor Blog: “What to do before you hire a Web designer.” The photo of the blue dog is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of lepiaf.geo.
