How a professional website is created

As active web designers in Nottingham and the East Midlands, we are sometimes asked, surprisingly (!), “What do you actually do?” Well that’s a reasonable question, so let’s take a look to see what is really involved in the creation of a professional web site.

The first step is the design of the web site.

It is important to determine the best structure for your site. This involves determining the pages, sub-pages, and navigation. We then need to look at how we are going to set up the headers, footers and sidebars. The formatting that we use for image placement must be also considered, as well as where social media share buttons will be placed,

In the overall design we must think about logos and branding, as well as accessibility, usability, typefaces to be used, type sizes, and even the colours to be used.

As we make these decisions, we have to keep in mind the different screen widths that your website will be viewed on, such as tablets, desktops, and mobile devices. It is important that your Web site looks good and operates correctly on all devices.

Content

If, the content is to be produced by us, then there is research that needs to be done. The content will need to be written and optimised for keywords. Of course, all this will need to be proofread and checked. Our goal here is always to write original content. We strive to write engaging content in order to keep your visitors on your website. At this stage we will also consider the use of source graphics and photos.

Functionality

At this stage we start making decisions as to what happens when you click on a particular button.Although this issue is more important for online shops than other websites, we still want to make sure that your website has proper functionality.

Optimisation

This is where we begin compressing photos, in order to minimise the number of bytes without losing the quality of the image. We compress the code in order for your web pages to quickly load on all devices. This is particularly important for mobile devices on the 3G, because the mobile network runs slower than broadband. Optimisation is also what Google uses when determining where your Web site will be positioned in their search results.

Testing

At this point we test your entire site to ensure it works as expected on a multitude of desktop browsers. We Check desktop operating systems (PC and Mac) using Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera browsers. We also check to see how your website works on tablets (iPad and Android) as well as a variety of smartphones (iPhone and Android). Because there is more to test for online shops, this phase takes a little longer if you have this kind of website.

Time to move to the live stage

In order to make your website live, we upload all the code, videos, graphics, photos, all databases etc. to the live server. At this time we will set up a site map, a method for the collection of statistics, and we will make sure that the entire site is operating correctly and as expected.

This is been a quick high level overview of what is needed for a professional website. As this is just an overview, please do ask, if there are things not mentioned that you feel should be here.

Photo by Halacious on Unsplash