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There are planning steps in the web design process that come long before you choose a domain name or start to build a website. Take time with the planning phase before you even start browsing templates and you’ll make the rest of the website development process much easier.
To set yourself up for a successful website launch, go through these stages.
Define your goals.
Know your brand.
Understand your audience.
Consider potential barriers to your goals.
Come up with solutions to those barriers.
Think about how you can put the above into action.
1. Define the goal of the website
Setting goals for your website is one of the most important early steps in any web design project. Those goals can help you decide everything from which visuals to include on your homepage to what pages your site needs.
To clarify your website goals, ask yourself:
Who is the intended audience for the website?
Ideally, what would people do after visiting the website? Would they buy something, contact you, or click through to your social media?
What information does someone need to know to take the action you want them to take?
That will clarify the main goals of your website in terms of who you want to reach and what you want them to do on your site. From there you can set more specific goals, like the number of sales or new clients per month coming from your website.
Get our guide to measuring success on your website
2. Know your brand
Having a clear vision for your brand makes it easier to make design choices once you start building your website. One way to do this is to give your brand a personality as if it were a person. If you’re building a personal website, think about your own personality.
Think about it like this:
What are a few adjectives you’d use to describe your brand’s personality?
How do you want your brand to make other people feel?
In one or two sentences, what is your brand’s mission?
If your brand were a person you know or know of, who would they be?
Use the answers to these questions to guide your decisions. Knowing your brand identity can help you get a sense of its voice in written content. Its mission can clarify where it makes sense for your brand to show up online.
How you want your brand to make people feel can help you make visual choices. For example, if you want your branding elements to make people feel calm and your brand has a soothing personality, you might go for less bold fonts and softer, cooler color schemes.
3. Understand your audience
The first two steps of the design process will help you pinpoint your target audience. Once you know what you want people to do on your website and what your brand is, you can identify which audiences fit your goals and brand personality.
Understanding your audience means having a clear idea of:
Basic demographics of your audience, like age and location
Where your audience spends its time online
What problems your audience is trying to solve for themselves
How your target customer makes decisions
The pricing your customer expects for products or services like yours
The website browsing experience your audience expects to have
Knowing your target audience’s demographics and where they spend their time online will help you hone your brand voice and focus your marketing strategy.
A strong sense of what your audience’s problems are will help you communicate your value to them. Understanding how they make decisions (if they might want to see reviews, what similar businesses charge) will help you guide them through that process on your website.
Other functionality, like whether competitors offer one-click payment options at checkout, can help you choose features to add to your website.
Get our full guide to building an audience
4. Consider barriers to your goals
Revisit your website goals and ask if there’s anything that might keep you from meeting those goals. For example, you might say:
You want people to book your freelance services. A barrier is that they may not trust your expertise.
You want people to buy your products. A barrier is that they don’t know you sell that product.
You want more people to sign up for your newsletter. A barrier is that you don’t know how to reach new readers.
You want to add visual elements to your website. A barrier is that you don’t have images ready.
5. Come up with solutions
Once you understand some of the potential barriers ahead, you can brainstorm solutions for them.
Taking the examples above, you might try the following.
Customers may not trust your expertise. Add reviews or client testimonials and give more background on your professional experience on your homepage and About Me page. Add a return and refund policy.
People don’t know about your product. Connect your ecommerce store to Google or Instagram to create shoppable product listings. Send email marketing to your customers about new product launches.
You don’t know how to reach new newsletter readers. Share a link to sign up on your website and social media. Improve your website SEO or add new content like a blog so interested readers can find you via search engine.
You don’t have images ready for your site. Go for a bold text-only website design. Or add stock design elements and licensed stock photos that fit your brand aesthetic.
Try to come up with more than one solution so that you can test a few and find out what works best for you.
6. Bring the pieces together
Once you’ve done the preparation, you can dive into the website design process with clarity and purpose. You may even find it helpful to mock up web pages or write down ideas to keep in mind while you’re designing.
Whenever you feel unsure about the visual style or site structure, come back to your web design planning. Ask if any of these steps could help you answer your questions. Stuck on website copy? Revisit your audience and brand brainstorming. Not sure what to put on a page? Think about your goals for that page and how it contributes to your overall website goals.
Finally, test out the user experience as a whole. Is your website content interesting? Does the visual design draw attention to important information or calls to action? Is it easy to navigate your website, with no broken links anywhere?
Stay in the design phase until you feel like you have all the pieces you need to launch your new website. As you and your brand grow, come back to update pages or the web design to make it your own.