The web design process, when completely correctly, involves a number of decisions that many people don’t realize. The website design process involves an in-depth understanding of consumer behavior, the goals of the business, and of the platforms and features needed to make a website powerful.

At Responsival, we help businesses make a website that will work as hard as you do. This means that we take the time to identify your business’s biggest challenges, issues with your existing website, and more before we start designing. 

That’s why Responsival is here to break down four key decisions to make during the web design process. From designing a user journey to deciding between Webflow vs. Wordpress, these questions will help lay the foundation for the perfect website for your business that helps you reach your business objectives. 

Webflow vs. Wordpress

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Initiatives

When designing a website, one of the first things that you’ll need to decide is which platform to use for your site. There are a number of web design platforms out there for you to choose from, including Webflow, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and more. Each platform has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, all of which need to be considered early in the web design process.

Many of our clients are caught choosing between Webflow vs. Wordpress. WordPress is the largest platform on the internet right now with more than 27 million live websites. However, businesses and web designers alike encounter a number of frustrations when building a website on WordPress. WordPress sites are essentially piecemealed together with multiple plugins to get all of the features that a contemporary website needs. This not only leads to complex backend code that can be difficult to edit, but these plugins have a tendency to break and must be paid for on an individual basis -- a  format that can be costly and time-consuming to maintain.

Webflow, on the other hand, is the perfect platform for web design because it allows web design firms to design websites for desktop and mobile devices with ease. All features are accessible via drag-and-drop formats (with coding options available) that create a clean, concise code for a fast functioning website. Best of all, all the features are included in your pricing, making it a cost-effective platform for hosting your website that you can rely on.

In the end, choosing between Webflow vs. WordPress isn’t a tough call for most. Whether you’re just starting your website or are looking to make the switch from WordPress to Webflow, Responsival can help you get your new website up and running to accomplish your digital business goals.

E-Commerce Capabilities

Should You Sell Products and Services Online?

An extremely important question to ask yourself is whether or not you want to sell products online through your website. This question in many ways trumps the Webflow vs. Wordpress debate (although both platforms have e-commerce capabilities) and welcomes e-commerce platforms into the mix.

Not only does the desire to sell products and services online change your web design platform, but also changes the look and layout of your website as a whole. E-commerce websites typically involve the creation of more pages, fulfillment workflows, and a number of intricate processes that need to be worked out while designing.

E-commerce isn’t for every business, but with time e-commerce could add value to a number of different businesses. If it’s too early to turn your site into an e-commerce site, you can still choose online booking and management software like MindBody, Vagaro, Zen Planner, and more that make it possible to sell your services online.

Using a CMS

Build SEO and Provide Information Using a CMS

Once you’ve decided on a platform for your website, it’s time to figure out what your website will have on its pages. Every website has a few basics: a homepage, about page, contact page, and often have pages for reviews and FAQ. Depending on your business and industry, you may need to add a CMS to your website, which allows you to build out pages quickly and efficiently for the following purposes:

• Company Blog: Add SEO value to your website by diversifying keywords used in reader-friendly, informative content.
• Location Pages: Increase local SEO by dedicating pages to specific cities and municipalities to let them know they are within your service area.
• Menus: Showcase your menu in a format that is easy to sort and edit as changes arise.
• Service Pages: great for companies with a wide array of services, a CMS allows you to dive deeper into what your business offers while minimizing the time spent during creation.
• Portfolios: Showcase your work and highlight case studies with ease using pre-formatted pages within a CMS.

Web Designers like to get a lay of the land early on in the design process so that they can decide where a CMS may be useful and which pages may need to be built out individually. The existence of a CMS could be a major aspect of your choice between Webflow vs. Wordpress, so be sure to keep this in mind while designing.

Define Your User Journey 

Make a Clear Path for Users to Engage with Your Website

Before getting started, a web designer will create a clear user journey for your site visitors. A user journey outlines the ways in which visitors navigate your site from one page to another to complete important actions on your website.

To do this, you must first decide what you would like site visitors to accomplish while on your site. For many businesses, this involves completing a contact form or calling the business directly. For e-commerce, the ideal user journey ends with someone purchasing an item.

These user journeys outline how people navigate - perhaps by learning about your mission before buying checking out to make sure your cover the service they need before calling - and help web designers create the proper path and CTAs needed to accomplish the user journey.

Think it’s time to make big moves on your website redesign or build? Get in touch with the team at Responsival today to get started.