Web Design Planning

In a website development process, planning can be the most crucial and critical step. However, prior to planning how to arrange and build your web design you need to initiate a plan which stems from an idea. Without an idea for your web design, you have no beginning. Brainstorming various possible web designs is very important prior to narrowing in on one idea and discussing various thoughts and possible directions pertaining to that single web design idea. This initiation phase will ensure that your website has been given a fair change and the people designing it have chosen the most effective web design from a pool of various well thought-out and carefully discussed web design ideas. After this is complete and you have chosen the most applicable web design concept then move to the planning phase, and into the fun part of web design, the actual designing.

The first thing you should know is that it is important to list all the functional or "must have", desired, and nice-to-have requirements for your web design. The functional requirements are those that are absolutely needed in order for your web design to function according to plan. Desired requirements are those that will be added to the web design after the more important functional requirements are in place – and if time permits. Lastly, the nice to haves are just that "nice to have", once again if the desired requirements can be completed and if there is residual time than "nice to have" features can be added to the web design. It’s those little additional touches that really make all the difference.

On your web design, efficient navigation and linking structure is paramount if you want your users to be able to effectively locate resources within your web design. For example, if you are building a medium-sized web design, your main navigation bar should have no more than 10 first level links, however, you may decide to employ a drop down menu that has several second or even third level links to different locations in your web design. Whatever you decide to do within your web design in terms of navigation, be sure to keep your users in mind and try and continuously try to simplify the task of locating resources. A great way to do this is to develop "use cases". Use cases are scenarios where a user will try and accomplish a per-defined task, by getting a couple different people to draw out use cases will help you determine a strong navigational structure.

Keep this information in mind when creating your web design and you will be creating masterpieces of web design in no time.