I know designers are doing lot of good projects and all of them are very busy with their works. I would like to ask you a question, Are you planning before designing? Most of the answer is NO, and the reason is no one has enough time to do. But every designers should follow these steps before starting designing. Most of the top designers are following these steps to accomplish a good design. So let’s start exploring web design process or steps.

Gather

The first step before stating a project is gathering requirements. Of course you can get it from your Client or from your project managers. But what are the requirements we have to collect? Hmm this is a question, but don’t worry, you can create your own client requirement sheet. A sample can be found here. You can modify it as per your needs.

Analyse

The next step after getting your requirements is Analyse. You must aware of all details of the requirement. You can analyse that the given requirement is sufficient or not. If not, you can easily ask to your client. But asking too many questions may frustrate the client, so be clever. This is  a sub-head of information architecture. Read more about IA here.

Research

After analysing your requirements, you can do a research about the info you gathered. Research can be online or offline. Offline research includes visiting client’s company or taking surveys with the real users etc. Online research includes visiting their existing site, their competitor’s site, customer reviews, social searching like in Twitter and Facebook, visiting other websites with same category, or any websites for your inspiration.

Wireframes

After doing a lot of research you can start designing wireframes with your idea. You can create wireframes in a notepad or anything else you wish. You can also create it online, but I suggest doing in paper. Detailed info about wireframes is beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested to know more about wireframes, we have written another detailed article about wireframes. You can read it here.

Iteration

Iteration is an endless process, but you can give your wireframes to your client. He may have some suggestions or improvements. You can have a discussion with the client. After lot of iterations, you will get a final version of your design.

Design

Once you finalized the Wireframes, you can start designing with your favourite tools. If you wish you can scan the wireframes to your computer for a reference. Then you will get a better idea to design.

Conclusion

So, these are the steps to follow before starting your design. Please note that we have only listed the major processes. Also there may be lot of process according to the type of project. If you have any comments or suggestions, please write it below.