Web Design Brief

The single-most important step of the web design process is creating a design brief. This is where we find out what you want and need for your website. For example we will ask about your company, it’s size and structure, your products and/or services, existing branding, your target audiences and competition. This all helps us define our goals for creating a website that will suit your particular needs and is the base from which visual concepts and other site decisions are made.

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your web design brief on webstrategy

Website Look and Feel

People are often unaware of the degree to which the ‘look’ of a website affects our perception of the company, product or service. Graphic designers are trained to be aware of the visual cues creating these perceptions, and how to strategize for the right ‘personality’ to present. We discuss various approaches with you, based on your design brief, to come up with a direction for the site design. We then apply this design to the different navigation levels and different types of content in the site, in order to ensure a consistency of the approach.

Ease of Use and Navigation

Integral to websites is the experience of navigating and using the site. We remember what we received from our visit. Was it frustrating, or useful and rewarding in some way? Good structural design builds trust, and thoughtful interaction design for site functionalities will earn repeat visitors and customers, as well as word-of-mouth recommendations. Depending on the complexity of the site, various methods can be used to ensure a good experience for the visitor. These range from the basic site map diagram to our white site methodology and wireframe screen layout demonstrations, to full working prototypes with user-testing sessions. The navigational design required for a site is decided in discussion with the client.

Making it Happen - Web standards compliant CSS

In order to go from approved concept to a final product, the web design goes into the talented hands of our page construction team. They build CSS (cascading style sheet) based templates for the page layout, colours and type styles in the site. Creating the site using CSS based layout requires skill, but helps us to achieve the following goals:

• pages are smaller and quicker to load
• pages are accessible to people using mobile devices or speech readers
  
• pages conform to WC3 web standards, which is required by most government websites
• pages are optimised for search engines

The web designer and project manager take the role of keeping an eye on the production process so that the approved design is correctly translated into the final website.