Liquid Silver Marketing creates user experiences, developing the brands of tomorrow
Web Design Planning
Before we move on to creating a prototype for the website plan, we will need to develop a site map which organizes the website and plans which pages are important and in what order they should go.
A sitemap acts like a blue print, you wouldn't build a house without one would you?
At this stage we can understand the size of the site and plan to scale the site in the future if needed.
It helps to better understand the components of the navigation which forms part of the userability, we're also able to track and understand the flow process of the sites goals when developing the site architecture. Site mapping is the most important part of a design and yet many designers seem to think that its just used for sending the final site to Google.
For example if we are looking a e-commerce
- How does a sale take place?
- Does the layout effect this?
- Is this process easy to use?
- How long does the sale take?
- What's the best layout to use, in what order should the pages go?
Once we've got a basic site-map together we will work on creating an SEO strategy, that involves keyword research, competitor research, audits customer profiling.
This will help us build a picture of your brand, market to help us shape the ideas that inform our 'Inbound Marketing Plans'.
Planning the website I.A (information architecture) is perhaps one of the most important parts of website design. As new layers of information are added its important that we think about the long-term communications strategy. The SEO plan that we will apply to the website will need to be bespoke which make take time depending on the timescales we have, but planning will save time and money in the long term when we undertake further development on the SEO profile
If these principles are used from the outset then we will have a good model to build a site from.A well-built site will keep the audience engaged Often online we are always fighting against bounce rates,
A Bounce rate, a famous web analytics specialist once said;
"A bounce rate is how many people visited your website puked and left" (Avinash Kaushik)
A bounce rate is where a visitor reaches your website and bounces off without visiting another page, some Search Engines see this as a sign of quality and relevancy of the page if a site has a high bounce rate it isn't serving the need of the searcher and therefore reflecting on the search engine for sending them to an irrelevant page or website.
A common bounce rate is normally in the range of 50%, some higher and some lower it really depends on your industry sector. But worth keeping an eye on to see how the design works, there are also many other metrics we monitor to consider how well the site is performing.
Your website home page is one of the most important part of your site as it will get most of the traffic, it acts and functions as a door way to it is important from the outset to make a good impression. It should contain clear information about
Who you are, What you do, it must be inviting and clear from clutter.
Its important to understand some of the key-performance indicators that you will measure the sites success from at the planning stage. that way we'll know how successful the site will be also giving us some data to work on when we optimise the website, which goes beyond standard keyword rankings.
Wireframing, A Web Design Planning Tool
Liquid Silver Marketing, Web Design home page
A Wireframe helps us to see the big picture when planning a website or even just looking at a site without the design.Often we can get caught up in the semantics of web design without really thinking about its functionality. This helps us to plan space especially when another section may need to be added at a later stage.
A Wireframe is a basic box model layout design we use this to better understand how a page will be designed. Where we allocate an area for each component to help decide where it is going to be placed. For example we may need to understand that on each page the logo goes in on the right and the main navigation is assigned the left and uses 500 pixels. Thereby leaving 460 pixels for the logo to sit within.
These plans create a map and design rules for a page, these can be changed as the design takes shape for example a page about the products may need to have a specific navigation that's not applicable to other pages at this stage if we plan different pages we will be able to reuse some of the design components.
We work on this plan in black and white and without any design style this is so we can get a clear understanding of where things go and how much space we will need. This is process is one of the most important part of designing a site as it bring the plan to life
Saves time and money - Bringing the design to life
Before going too far and then realizing that this page or process doesn't work and well because of proximity - although these thing do happen it helpful to know first, imagine building a house and finding out after that the kitchen is in the right corner but its on the wrong floor!
At this stage we will have a good understanding of the website architecture, because we have planned the size levels of content, and tested the general requirements of the design.
From this we have a good starting point to build a Website from.
