by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 16, 2010

While there’s many documentation and theory about project management and project workflow on disciplines such as software development, web design doesn’t seem to have received so much attention. Every web design project is different, and sometimes it’s part of a bigger web development initiative. However, there’s some steps that are common to most web design projects and constitute the minimal web design project workflow.

Stakeholder consultation (Data gathering and analysis)
The first step in the workflow of a successful web design project is gathering the required information. Generally, this can be accomplished by talking with the stakeholders, be it a client or internal to the company, about the website goals, requirements and needs. Identifying all those things will allow the designer to create a website design that matches what the client had in mind, and it’s appropriate for the target audience. There’s many checklists and documents about requirement gathering, and often the web designer will end up developing their own set of questions and adapting them to specific customers. From this step, the web designer will learn things such as who are the target demographic, what should a visitor feel like when on a website, what is the message or action that needs to be communicated to that visitor and what are the general style preferences or brand image rules.

Prototyping and wireframing
Prototyping is a quick way of turning the above requirements into a visual form, to check with the client that everything has been understood correctly and it’s on track. A prototype doesn’t even need to be done on a computer, can be a set of hand drawn sketches with the main items of the design and things such as website navigation and structure. This step will show the client where and how the information and content of the website is displayed, and how the user would navigate from one section to the other.

Mockups
At this point the general layout of the site has been approved, and the designer will start creating image files, usually with Photoshop or a similar graphic program. In many cases, there’s at least a few initial mockups, and the client will choose one of them to be refined. At this stage, the artistic aspect of Web Design becomes central, with things such as colours, fonts and images. This step of a web design project workflow is iterative, which means the initial mockup will change depending on client feedback

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