How Many Web Designers...
Many people wonder why it takes more than one person to build a website. Are you one of them? The truth is building a website is just as complex as writing a song or a movie; so many different skills are needed that one person cannot do them all.
To illustrate this, I’m going to give a brief rundown of the tasks involved in creating just a single page for a website – the homepage:
- Firstly, you need to decide on both the purpose of the site and your target market. This will have a considerable impact on the rest of the process
- Next, you need to decide what pages you want for the site, because a large site will require a different style of navigation than a small site
- What features do you want? If you want to have news or blog posts on your site, then you will want the latest articles or posts on the homepage. If you require a search system for the site, then this should go on the home page too
- Once the basic features are settled, we can now create the general design and layout, going through multiple iterations until everyone involved is happy
- Whilst the design is being honed, the features decided upon earlier need to be built – if the search system doesn’t work, then there is no point having a search box on the homepage
- With the underlying design in place, we can begin creating the homepage. Every graphical element on the page must be created from scratch: buttons, backgrounds, and anything else that is needed
- Once we have these elements, we can start to code the homepage, building up the general structure until it looks like the original designs
- We then start the task of testing the page across the common browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) to make sure that all of the features work correctly and display consistently
- As we get the finishing touches in place, you need to obtain or create the content for the page. This might require a copywriter for the text of the page, and a photographer for the imagery
- By this point, the majority of the design and development is complete. Therefore, we can start populating the content you supply us with
- With the content ready, we are almost finished. One of the last tasks is making sure the home page is properly optimised for search engines to index – otherwise all of the hard work up to this point will be wasted
- Now that the design, development, content population and SEO work is done, the homepage is pretty much complete. It doesn’t stop here though – the rest of the site still needs to be built, followed by the continuing process on creating new content for news articles and blog posts
As you can see, there is a lot of work here – and this list is by no means definitive, nor is it particularly detailed. Precisely because there are so many tasks, it is not only unreasonable to expect a single person to get everything done, but impractical as well. If you want the excellent results you deserve, then it becomes a nigh on impossible job for a single person.
We have the skills and expertise at Base Creative to complete nearly every task on the list above – and for the few areas we don’t do in house, we have excellent contacts to fill in the gaps. All that is left is for you to help us get the project started!