The process isn’t straightforward in the sense of coming up with a boilerplate solution.
The first step is defining the goal of the website—usually one for a product, an agency, or whatever business you run. This would also determine the type of web solution you’re after—it could be a simple 5-page brochure site, a content hub for SEO, an eCommerce solution, or maybe a SaaS platform.
The next step is defining the target audience. Your ideal buyer persona will include demographics, job details, and interests – including their browsing habits. The browsing experience of the average 65-year-olds and a teenager is different, starting from the difference between using an old desktop Windows computer with Edge vs. an iPhone with Safari to the types of websites or apps they use on a daily basis.
Your target market is critical to the message you want to send—which is step #3.
After the product-market fit is confirmed and the audience is clarified, figure out what your brand needs to project. Your brand voice (strict vs. playful vs. whatever feeling you want to project) will be represented through your color scheme, layout, typography, logo, and type of assets present on the future website.
Once again, banking websites are boring because they present a lot of data, have to be compliant on tons of web standards, and accessible for a broad number of users – including the elderly, or those who aren’t tech-adepts. New startup apps usually target early adopters, and innovative UI and UX play a role in capturing their attention.
Once you’ve got this mixed sorted, you’ll end up with a rough concept of roughly what features would be required, what sort of layout would make the most sense for your audience, and the feel you want to project through the system.
Hiring a creative agency or a designer to create the UI concept, and ideally, a UX expert for the best user experience practices would be the next logical step. Web design turns into HTML/CSS/JS for a static website, and this finally ends up being the front-facing portion of your website built by a developer or a dev shop in a CMS like WordPress or a framework like Laravel or Django or whatever tech requirements and preferences you have (or your vendor recommends).
