From start to finish, there’s a lot more that goes into building a complete website than meets the eye!  To say that web design is simply a matter of designing a website leaves out a lot of the important facts.  It’s really a multi-faceted process—one that takes quality planning and expert implementation to get right.  Let’s take a look at the major components of a comprehensive web development project…

One:  Planning

First things first, every website must be carefully planned.  Here at Sleepless Media, we usually start right away when receiving a quote request.  We’ll look at all of the information provided and conceptualize a better feel for how the overall project will flow and what details will entail.  As we evaluate projects, we maintain an ongoing dialogue with our customers to ensure we completely understand the goals and gather all of the right information.

Two:  Project Management

Once the details are all rounded up and put in order, the next step is sending over a detailed formal proposal.  After an agreement is reached and the deal is inked, then it’s time to start taking care of business.  This is where it’s integral to have an efficient, organized project management system in place—without proactive project management to track and guide the web development project over each phase through realization of its full scope, there’s really very little chance of putting all of the pieces together so they actually form a desirable, high-performance finished product.  Project management is just that vital.

Three:  Copywriting

It’s always a good idea to know going into a new web development project that copywriting is one of the most essential components of a good website.  It truly is the lifeblood of the site when it comes to SEO and drawing visitors’ attention.  The thing is, it’s not automatically a part of web design (even though the best websites are designed to work hand-in-hand with their copy).  Many folks choose to supply their own site copy—we can work with this and will even be happy to give you some pointers.  We can also help you produce compelling optimized copy; just ask us about our copy and content process.

Four:  Creating The Look & Feel

This phase is the artistic process—the graphic design, if you will.  Usually done by expert professional graphic designers using industry-standard software like Photoshop, the look and feel must be both attractive and thematically appropriate for the subject of the website being designed.  The look and feel can make or break a website.

Five:  Production & Development

Once the visual design of the site is complete and agreed upon, then the next phase of the web development process is to “slice” the design.  This is kind of a reverse engineering process where the visual and style elements are broken down into optimized pieces and tied together through standards-compliant web code.  Doing this right is really an art of its own!

Six:  Web Programming

With the front-end of the website in place now, the next phase of the web development process is building the systems on the back-end that make it work.  The cogs of the machinery include E-Commerce systems, dynamic databases, and content management systems (CMS), along with other detailed programming work.

Seven:  Testing

After the programming phase is complete, all of the components are put together in their intended final form and the quality assurance phase kicks into full gear.  Extensive testing for standards, functionality, and compatibility are very important to making sure full satisfaction is met.  After all, all of the prior phases of development would go to waste if the finished product simply didn’t work right.

Eight:  Launch

Only once comprehensive testing and debugging is complete will the site be ready to launch.  But once it is, this is the most exciting part…putting your new website creation on to the web after extensive planning, development, and testing.

So, would you agree that building a great website is a little bit more detailed than just patching together some code and content and calling it finished?  It’s true—quality web development requires significant planning and preparation; but as the project wraps up, it becomes very evident that the attention to detail is definitely worth all of the effort!

Print design vs. web design—at first impression, it’s safe to say that there are a few similarities.  But when you really get down to it, the two ambitions are really very different schools of thought.  A web site must work with thousands of different combinations of computers, monitors, and web browsers…print is designed to be displayed (printed) at one specific size.

It’s probably best to stick with a web designer to do your website work and a print graphic designer to handle the traditional offline stuff.  Here’s why…

Online Is All About Speed – High resolution print graphic files are huge.  And after all, why not?  The files aren’t being transferred to the masses via the web, so there’s really no excuse to sacrifice any quality whatsoever by shrinking down the file size.  On the other hand, the goal of optimized graphics for the web is to display on the end user’s monitor clearly and crisply at the absolute lowest file size possible to get the job done.  Sacrificing speed and bandwidth is costly on the web.

Usability Is Essential – While print design is intended to look great and send a message visually to the viewer, web design must take it a few steps further and actually be functionally interactive at the same time.  In other words, viewers aren’t just looking at a web design; they’re actually becoming immersed within it.  The design components all have to work perfectly together to make the website design easy to use and easy to navigate.

Fonts Are Completely Different – Print fonts vs. web fonts are drastically different.  Basically, it boils down to the fact that only a few standard fonts display accurately and universally across the web.  Every web design needs to take into account the “least common denominator” when it comes to fonts, in order to render correctly when the ideal fonts aren’t available on the viewer’s system.  To the contrary, print designers are fortunate enough to be able to choose any font they’d like to use.

Web Design Must Account For Coding – There’s a huge difference in laying out a graphic design for print and implementing it for a website.  In many ways, with print design, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG).  On the other hand, once the overall graphic design for a website is complete, it must be completely deconstructed—piece by piece—and then code must be written to tell web browser software exactly where each piece of the design needs to be displayed.

A Few Words About Color Space – You might be somewhat familiar with the terms RGB and CMYK.  These are known as color spaces, and along with a few other commonly used systems, they are basically like the “box of crayons” used to create a design.  But computer monitors, by default, work only with RGB—so that’s the standard for web design.  On the other hand, traditional print presses rely on the CMYK “box of crayons.”  Color spaces are just not very interchangeable.

There are many other substantial differences between print design and web design as well.  The bottom line is that you always want to make sure your web designer has extensive experience working with the web—it’s just too much different than print to be considered the same school of design.