What to Include With All Your Website Designs
There is a lot of work that goes into making a website. Unless you are working with a team of designers and developers, the process of building and designing a website often falls on one person. When done correctly, designing a website involves a lot more than just some simple wireframes. A full website design includes choosing colors, fonts, layout, navigation and styles for every element. If you really want to be thorough, website designing should also include research for how the end user will interact with the website and the features they would look for.
With how much information that is involved in planning a website design, it’s impossible for one person to keep track of it all. This is why web designers often use design guides to have a single, convenient place to put all of their content.
Why Use a Design Guide?
For smaller projects, it’s easy to just jump right into building a website without any kind of planning. After all, making designs for every single aspect of a website is not exactly a small process. You have to design logos, wireframes, site maps, color pallets and the documentation to put it all in. Taking the time to do all these things can easily double the time it takes to build a website from start to finish. So why do it?
A worst nightmare scenario for any web developer is to spend days or weeks developing a website for a client and then for them to look at the finished product and tell you they hate it. No one wants to waste time doing that much work, just to have to turn around and do it all over again. Ensuring that you and your client are on the same page before you begin the build process is absolutely essential for any website project and can save you a lot of time and money in the end.
What to Include in Your Design Guide
Because there are so many things that go into making a website, there are potentially a lot of things that could be put into the design guide. So what should you include in yours? That depends on what you are going to use it for.
Design guides should be used as a reference for the developer/s of a website to ensure they are on the same page as both the designers and the client. To make sure the developers get all the information they need to build the website the way designers intended, the design guide should always include site maps, logos, color pallets, font styles and wireframes. These are all things that can/ should be shown to the client prior to beginning development on the site. Other things that may be helpful to include but should not necessarily be shown to the client are personas, concept models and sketches.
As an example, I have included a link to a design guide I made for a project in one of my college classes at Utah Valley University. It’s not a perfect example but does include all of the important elements that should be used in a successful design guide.
Landon Hatch is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to (Final Project) in the (DGM 2250 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
