Design plays a huge roll in changing your visitors into customers.
Web Design is a growing industry that has been around long enough, now people who are not designers are starting to understand the value of optimizing and testing their websites. The web is getting finicky and more demanding when judging the design and construction of today’s websites. A good designer or developer should implement a healthy marriage between site architecture, website function, web design and optimization. I have found at least 2 of the fore of these are left out on almost 90% of the websites I analyze while surfing the web. When digging deeper into perfecting these aspects an entire world was opened up to me. Everything from solving problems with table-less design to implementing WC3 standards became a hole new obsession with my work. I know a designer can only put so much work into a website before their time and resources go over budget, but improving your design strategy and processes can make a huge difference in the quality of your work. Blue Light Labs is a Atlanta web design company that has undergone so many changes in it's internal structure and processes. Our goal for 2009 is to improve and focus on this these elements of improvement.
Building a list of tools and resources to help you implement a strategy to improve on the quality control of your work is essential. These tools will always continue to change just as your skills will in order to perfect your trade. A huge part of our job as website design professionals is to keep our skills and processes up to date with the times. I spend about 20 percent of my time researching new website technologies and concepts. We can't afford to fall behind when the internet's rules and requirements are changing every day. After I started engaging in this way of thinking, I was not only more satisfied and proud of my work, but my clients also started to trust in our direction more. .
At Blue Light Labs it has become essential for our team to communicate and build bridges between our skill sets. For example our designer needs to understand the fundamentals of a sites dynamic architecture to help out the programmer. The Marketing expert in tern needs to communicate how the optimization and structure impact the projects marketing goals and so on and so forth. We cannot be professionals at everything, but in my opinion it is great educate to understand the fundamentals associated with each member of my team. Now, whenever our projects cross each of us acquire more knowledge about the others work, thus improving our process on the next project. Due to improved communication our templates are stronger our development time is cut in half and our web sites purr like cougars. Having this kind of design resource is priceless.
What seems to work great now is taking the time to put together an IA (Information Architecture Document). This document was originally a great tool for getting the projects specifics to our programmer so he can take the template and this document and run with it. I wanted to start getting in the habit of making this document appeal to all facets of the project.
Website Objective
This should be a 2-4 paragraph summery of the project and its objective. A little inside knowledge about the company, it's competition and it's direction is very important when setting the mood for a project. This area can also include some of our recommendations and additional questions we might want to ask the client.
A great article I read in the Decembers StomperNet issue covered these objectives. This article drew the conclusion that the visitor coming to the website should always have the feeling they are getting closer and closer to achieving their goal. Using strategic (Call to Action) placements and intuitive content and graphics add dramatically in this. We must never forget the primary objective of the project so keep that in mind.
Template web design and Site Structure
This section is a combination of general notes and box diagrams based on the websites structure and layout. Each box diagram is separated into modules with numbers that associates each segment of the site with the technical specs that will be outlined in the following areas.
Front and backend functionality
In le mans terms this section of the AI should describe in as much detail as possible what each numbered area does and how it corresponds with the functionality requirements of the project. I struggled with this part of the document a good deal. I was surprised how hard it was to take my way of thinking and understanding and then turn it into a set of instructions our programmer could decipher without confusion. After some good communication and mutual agreements on common terminology this very important section of the IA can be ironed out..
Administrative Requirements
Many clients we take on already have a site and want to make the administration more intuitive and easy to use. Everything from grouping products for ecommerce systems to blogging and adding SEF friendly content can always be improved on. Typically we will use the same backend look and feel for each project unless there are specific needs pointed out by the client.
Internet Marketing Requirements
Most of this area is dedicated to outlining page navigation, site map structure, core SEF URL outlines and CSS output requirements. The websites general titles, descriptions and primary key phrases are drawn out in order to get a good idea of how the traffic will flow.
Project hosting requirements and general information
Outlining general details saved us a great deal of time searching the server or calling people for lost details. Any email addresses, ftp accounts, domain transfer passwords or project hosting requirements we list here so we have it all in one place.
Getting us all used to this outline was not easy and in all fairness still has its kinks. I do have to say I can see the response we are getting from our customers is really becoming worth the extra effort. I for one am enjoying my work now even more and at the same time delivering a superior product.
