Our Web Design Process:

When we talk about web design what do we mean? Is it about the looks of the site? Is it about the form of the site? And what should it be? Should it be really good looking, colorful and splashy? Is that what matters – the looks of the site?

Do looks matter?

It’s pretty much the same as an ad you see on television. You come across some ads that are really humorous with good looking in nice surroundings and you enjoy watching it. But did that Ad move you to action? Did you pick up the phone and call? Do you get up and go to the dealership or to the store to buy what they were selling? Is that Ad going to make you a customer or not? Same thing on the web, the medium is different, objective is the same.

The design of your website should be such that leads you to action, and that action is different for different organizations. If you are a charity, you want people to donate either time or money. If you are an E-commerce site, you want people to buy what you are selling. If it is an informational site you want to reinforce beliefs or thoughts. Some sites of course are of a different nature like news site or entertainment site where the objective is to make people linger so that the more time they spend, the more money you generate from the Ads that you show on your site. But on most other sites, the objective is to make you take action, and that action determines the effectiveness of web design. Sometimes there is no easy answer so you go with multiple designs and then do A/B testing to figure out what appeals to your target market. Should you change colors; would red lead to action? Should a restaurant website have more red? Should a physician’s website have pastels only?

Non-Profits:

What about Masjid or a Church or a Temple, what will make people donate more? Quite often there is no easy answer. Instead of imposing a design on you, we work with you to come up with a design that is just right for you. We want the design to reflect your personality or your organization’s personality and also be in line with your customer expectations. For example, if your strength is price, we must not design a site that looks like a better fit for Fifth Avenue, as that would drive customers away.

Target Market:

Website design should be in line with your target audience. If your target market is teenagers, that should be reflected in the design, if your market is seniors, you should be more mindful of what appeals to senior and what they find comfotable. Sometimes it’s just as simple as a bigger font that makes it easy for them to read. Good design should be in line with your organization’s personality as well as your target audiences.

Sales Pages/Squeeze Pages:

Some of our best sales generating pages have been the ugliest. They were designed to generate a specific action and they did. It is especially true on squeeze pages or pages that are designed for single action, either you signup or you don’t. It’s beautiful if it delivers results.

The most sensitive market to layout, colors and form is the female market. Women love and appreciate colors, cuts, curves and pictures.

Blog Design:

Blogs are very personal in nature. They should reflect you. If you have a spartan personality, it would be best to take a minimalistic approach. If your general personality is very conservational, then we should design a blog that’s a very open it encourages discussion.

Logo Design:

One of the most subjective areas is logo design. Everybody wants a great logo. But nobody knows how to define a great logo. What is a great logo? It is some image in a person’s mind that is hard to translate. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that is very true about logos. We quite often ended up designing 10, 20, 25 different logos to come up with a logo that the client likes.

Give and Take between looks and functionality:

We also have to pay heed to other functions like hardware resources, bandwidth, storage and SEO. For example should we use Flash? In Flash you can do pretty much anything. You can have characters moving around in really animated screens. But Flash requires stronger servers and greater bandwidth and flash sites are not overly friendly towards SEO though the nature of SEO has changed so much that we don’t know how much that is important anymore.

Conventional or Responsive design:

Should we design for conventional computer screens? Or should we incorporate a responsive designs? Responsive design is one that looks good on smart phones and tablets as well as a conventional computer screens. All over the world more and more people are interacting with the web using mobile devices and web design has to take that into consideration. Our job is to make it easy for customers to interact with you.

Backend design:

Our approach towards designing a front end user interface (UI) is very different than designing the backend for you, your administrators, your data entry personnel, your sales people etc. When we are designing a backend, our focus is on speed, economy and functionality. For example, for your data entry staff we want to design an interface that involves the least number of key strokes – improves productivity. For your accountant, we want to provide all the numerical detail that he needs, preferably exportable in spreadsheet format so he can look at the data every which way.

API’s can be used to import product data feeds for upload to shopping portals. Saves massive data entry for large sites. For EDI, whether XML or conventional API, the end result is efficiency and accuracy.

We believe that a good design starts with the end result in mind. A spectacular design is wasted effort if the visitor does not do what you want him to do?

We can help you plan every detail from the color scheme to the placement of call to action buttons, to screen layout, to navigation, social media integration, info graphs and all that.

During the design process, our approach is;

1. To understand your business
2. To create a wire frame
3. To create a mockup with a responsive design in mind
4. To create the PSD
5. Slice the PSD into HTML5/CSS3
6. Hand it over to development

Design challenges:

As designers, we are always faced with a challenge. What tools and creatives deliver the best results. Should we use flash? Flash is a great tool but off late Jquery has taken over because Jquery is not that resource intensive, is adaptable to mobile devices and it’s great for sliders.

For landing pages, should we have a square grid style design or a parallax accordion style? Should we create info graphics? Should we add videos? How many videos? Should we have big sliders, small sliders, secondary sliders, footers, headers, sidebars, columns, all that is taken into consideration to create one wholesome website.

So how can we help you?

Fill out the contact form or pick up the phone and call us. Let’s talk.