3 Attributes Every Web Design Company Should Have

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The web design industry is a very unique one. It takes a particular set of skills that you might not expect in order to succeed. The success of your web design company depends on all your employees having the right qualities and being able to mesh well with each other.

The best web agency in San Francisco knows that success in this industry is almost entirely mental, and has devised a comprehensive list of things they need to have in place to facilitate success. Here are 3 attributes you should strive to have if you want to give your business the best chance for success.

 

  • Adaptability

 

This is a crucial ability that you need to have as a web design company. You want all your employees to be able to adapt to things on the fly and go with the flow. Web design as an industry is constantly changing and taking new directions, and it’s up to the top custom website design companies to change with it. Trends are ever-evolving, and sometimes you might need to switch lanes even when things are going well. That’s how you can stay ahead of the curve, rather than following the leader.

 

  • A Deep Understanding of User Experience

 

As a web design company, your job is to create the most attractive user experience possible for your customers. In order for you to do this, you need to really be entrenched in the mind of the user and see what they see.

For you to create a successful inbound marketing plan and get a high conversion rate, you need a deep and thorough understanding of the user experience. Only then will you be able to tailor your plan in a specific way that brings your client the best results. In this fashion, it is vital to understand how to improve your websites user experience.

 

  • Cross-Functional Skills

 

Whether you consider your company more adept at developing or designing, you need to be proficient in both. Oftentimes clients are going to need both services from you, so you need to be able to deliver whatever they ask. Just being talented at design won’t cut it if they also require some developing as well. In fact, most of the time you will need to do both interchangeably. It is extremely important to understand web design skills and experience for your company to thrive.

Having the ability to handle the needs of your client fully will give you a big leg up on other companies that only offer one service or the other. Do your best to have a complete balance of skills at your disposal, without sacrificing quality of course. By being a jack-of-all-trades and rounding out skillsets, your web design company is properly positioned to be both successful and competitive.
 

How to Succeed

 
It takes a wide variety of attributes to succeed as a web design company in 2018. You need a team of people who possess all the right skills required to satisfy your clients. In addition to having a deep understanding of the user experience and the ability to adapt, you also need to have web development skills as well as web design skills. If you can put all these pieces together, you should be able to enjoy a lot of success and dominate your competition.

 

Website Planning Process Guide with Marketing Intact

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When it comes to redesigning an old, clunky website or launching a brand-new website, there’s a process that takes your website from a clear concept to a fully-functional, interactive website: the website planning process.  Whether you’re doing this in-house or hiring a digital marketing agency, having a website plan in place can help eliminate unnecessary headaches down the line, resulting in optimized, effective web design.

 

The Website Planning Process

The website planning process involves understanding and deciding what combination of factors and tactics can go towards designing and developing a website that draws qualified traffic and helps boost your business’ online standing and authority among your competitors. Here at Zenden Design and most digital marketing agencies, the custom web design planning process involves the following steps:

 

Define your Goals

The first and foremost step to an efficient website planning process is to understand what you’re trying to achieve through your site. Even before you set out to look for prospective digital marketing or web design agency to work on your website, you need to assess for yourself why exactly you need your website. Prepare a brief that details these aspects such as:

– The primary goal of your website: Is it to drive sales for a product(s)? Is it to promote or generate buzz for an upcoming product launch? Is it to generate a revenue stream for a future endeavor?

– Your brand’s identity: This is about how you want to present yourself as a business to your audience: modern, traditional, professional, informal.

– Your primary and secondary audience: Define your ideal customer/site visitor: what are their demographics and characteristics?

– Your competition: Who are the major competitors in your niche, and what aspects of their websites do you like or want to do better than?

Going in armed with all the above information will smooth the rest of the process leading up to the website launch. Your website agency can use this information to lay out the rest of the design roadmap with more accuracy and specificity.

 

Discovery

With the project timeline and milestones mapped out and the contract put in place, this is the phase where you convey your vision and goals of your website to your team. This is where the brief you prepared beforehand comes in handy. The team then brainstorms and collaborates to come up with a final creative plan/brief that will serve as the basis for the rest of process.

 

Sitemap and Information Architecture

In this phase, your team maps out how the information on your website will be structured: in other words, the sitemap is developed. The sitemap is a tree-like structure that decides the hierarchy of the pages on your website, while the templates and layouts for the pages and the page flow. This is the more creative aspect of the website planning process, where you and your team can fully decide on how to customize your site to both your brand and your customers’ needs.

 

Content Gathering

Once the sitemap is in place, it’s time to decide what content will be populated on each page. This includes deciding what information customers or visitors will expect on each page, potential calls to action and other user experience (UX) aspects.

 

Website Style and Branding

At this stage, if you’ve already defined your goals and vision for the website, your team can then use it as the foundation to strategize the visual feel and the identity of your website: from the UX, color scheme, imagery, fonts, graphic styles. However, for clients that are unsure about what direction they want their website to go in, the team uses this stage to research the market and the competition in order to define the potential goals and vision for the site.

 

UX and Wireframing

This is a crucial phase where the team defines and maps out the actual experience the user will have while interacting with the website. Not to be confused with UI (user interface), UX involves developing wireframes for the entire website that defines how the customer/visitor will achieve their end-goal of visiting the website: from the order in which they navigate the pages and the actions they’ll need to take.

 

UI Design

With your content and wireframes set, this is the phase where it all comes together, with the style guides defining the overall look of the website through the fonts, colors, and images while the wireframes providing the foundation for the overall structure of the website. At the end of this stage, your website is nearly ready.

 

Design and Content Integration

Usually called the “beta-stage”, you’ll be provided with a beta or test version of your website that you can use to ensure and ascertain that everything in the website is working as it should. Use this stage to find any bugs or changes that need to be fixed/implemented before your website goes live. You can also use this phase to set up the website’s databases (if needed) and integrate the final content into the website.

 

SEO and Marketing Tactics

This isn’t a distinct phase by any means; in fact, it’s one that runs parallel to the entire process. Every step of the planning process should be finalized with the aim to make the site search-engine friendly.

The website planning process doesn’t have to be complicated: it’s just a matter of going into the process already armed and prepared with a clear vision of what you need your website to achieve. From there, it’s a matter of trusting your team/agency to translate that vision into reality through a carefully structured roadmap that is built around your website’s goals.