How It’s Made: Web Site Edition

Ever wonder how an idea becomes a web page?  Ask your local web designer and you might get an answer touting the importance of various coding languages and a little magic.  The reality is closer to a pragmatic form of art that has developed over the past quarter of a century.

With SolTerra Communications, this process begins with a thorough interview of the customer, much   Our mission is to determine, and sometimes help the client decide, what themes are important to the customer to make the point that a web presence is intended to make.  Our goal for all clients would be to distill as much information about their business as possible into the most concise package possible.

like a news reporter would give.

Another element of the interview is to organize the information the client gives us in such a way that it’s logical and easy for their target audience to understand.  If for example, our customer was a horse breeder, you wouldn’t want to have a category about mares listed under information about the care of newborns; thus putting the colt before the horse.

Once a good amount of important information has been collected and organized, the designer begins the visually creative process.  Most business pages of today need to follow a semi-rigid pattern of creation to allow for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so search engines can help potential users find your business more easily.  These parameters can be restrictive, but also provide a set of boundaries for building a web site that is most likely to attract customers.

With a firm grasp of SEO in hand, a design begins to draw, quite literally, the initial sketch, or mock-up, of the sites overall look.  It’s important to create an artistic theme that accentuates the desires of the intended design.  A web page for a horse breeder should make its visitors think of horses, for example.  The color scheme and imagery should all support the main theme, while constantly drawing the focus of the visitor to the content of the page.  A well designed page should be visually pleasing, but not distracting.

Finally, detailed content and information are added to the site, features are added and small design tweaks are made.  Several pairs of eyes generally act as editors to the final manuscript to make sure there are no errors and that the page has a pleasant appeal.

Next time you are surfing the web, take a moment and try to imagine how these design steps took place on the page you are on.