As an expert website designer and app tester with over a decade of experience evaluating 3,500+ real devices and browsers, I‘ve seen plenty of site launches go sideways. Rushed timelines. Lack of planning. Little testing across environments. It‘s no wonder many projects fail to deliver the returns envisioned.
But it doesn‘t have to be this way for your website. By following a comprehensive design process, you can create an online presence with the strategic foundations to delight visitors and achieve your goals now and into the future.
That‘s why I‘ve put together this ultimate 25-step checklist for modern website design. It covers everything from upfront planning and content creation to visual design, technical considerations and beyond.
My aim is to help steer you away from common pitfalls that plague many website builds. Have a vision for an incredible site but unsure how to get there? This guide has you covered with expert-level advice and actionable tasks to check off at each phase.
Let‘s get started, shall we?
Set Yourself Up for Success
Before diving into design, lay the groundwork for an organized, successful project with these preparatory steps:
Step 1: Clearly Define Your Goals and Target Audiences
Be specific about what you want to achieve to guide decisions. Identify who you want to connect with to craft relevant experiences.
Assess factors like:
- Purpose: Inform? Sell? Support? Build credibility?
- Personas: Detail visitor demographics, interests, pain points and motivations. Develop fictional but representative archetypes.
- Success metrics: Key Performance Indicators to define and track, like sales volume, subscriber sign-ups, etc.
Step 2: Research Your Competition and Customers
Learn how your industry addresses audience needs through their online presence. Discover gaps and opportunities to differentiate.
- Conduct competitor analysis to benchmark strengths and weaknesses
- Interview customers about frustrations with current solutions
- Map out customer journeys to find pain points
- Distill unmet needs into core value propositions
Tip: Repeat this research phase regularly post-launch to realign with audience and market changes over time.
Step 3: Define Site Content and Functional Requirements
Map out what foundational pages, features and integrations you need to deliver value.
- Pages: Homepage, About Us, Contact, etc. Plus ecommerce catalog, shopping cart and account flows.
- Features: Navigation, calls-to-action, forms, multimedia, personalization, etc.
- Integrations: Email, chat, analytics, ads, payment systems, etc.
Prioritize must-have MVP items from nice-to-have content.
Plan Your Site‘s Structure and Flow
Step 4: Create a Site Architecture Blueprint
Map out your site‘s organization and navigation to optimize intuitive access to information.
- Card sort content into logical groupings and categories
- Craft site information architecture to define relationships between grouped content
- Model proposed structure in a sitemap showing page connections
- Prototype basic wireframes to visualize layout
- Ensure mobile-first approach with responsive flexibility
Step 5: Select Your CMS Platform
Your content management system impacts flexibility of future edits. Evaluate options to suit capabilities needs.
- Ease of use for content managers without coding skills
- Responsiveness and mobility optimization
- Foundation for solid SEO
- Scalability to support evolving business needs
- Third-party integrations like analytics and payment systems
Top CMS picks include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Squarespace.
Step 6: Map Out Critical User Journeys
Model how target audiences will logically navigate to key pages and conversions to shape information flows.
- Homepage landing to awareness building
- Product exploration to purchases
- Contact page submission to sales call scheduler
- Blog discovery to email subscriber conversion
Connect journeys to business priorities and KPIs.
Create Quality Site Content
Step 7: Craft Compelling Content…with Intent
Move beyond generic corporate speak with punchy copy tailored to serve audience needs.
Align messaging to established goals, personas and journeys. Audit existing assets for relevance. Create and curate new content around gaps.
Balance three key content types:
- Inspirational: Educate and excite interest
- Functional: Explain offering logistics
- Transactional: Enable purchases and actions
Step 8: Integrate Strategic Visuals
Reinforce meaning and emotion with relevant, high-quality photographs, illustrations and video.
Strategic visual content tips:
- Show real people using your product or service
- Pick images with authentic emotion and composition
- Feature high-resolution photos with flattering lighting
- Use infographics to distill complex topics
- Produce videos to connect with and inspire
Aim for: 50% Images, 35% Text, 10% Video, 5% Graphic/Icons
Step 9: Construct Page Layouts
Organize written, visual and functional content into consumable layouts tailored to page purpose and audience priorities.
Eye-scanning patterns shape effective page composition. Strategically guide visitors by placing important elements according to following gaze hierarchy:
- Top Left
- Top Right
- Bottom Left
- Bottom Right
- Center of page
Use white space between elements and clear alignments to reduce noise.
Bring Pages To Life Through Design
With content mapped out, shift focus to aesthetically polish and finalize the look, feel and interactions of site pages.
Step 10: Style Your Brand Identity
Align visual design choices like color, typography, graphics and imagery to uniquely encapsulate your brand personality.
Brand identity toolkit:
- Color palette: Primary + accent colors
- Typography: Font styles and sizing
- Graphic styles: Illustrations, icons, shapes with coordinated aesthetics
- Image filters: Overlays (e.g. muted hue) to unify gallery aesthetics
- Tone: Conversational style and messaging frameworks tailored to brand voice
Step 11: Design Eye-Catching Page Layouts
Follow best practices for arranging page structure and elements for improved cognition.
Compose pages with principles like:
- Whitespace: Generous spacing between items to reduce noise
- Scannability: Clear content hierarchy for intuitive flow
- Emphasis: Leverage size, color, contrast to accent important items
- Alignment: Use grid foundations to align items and define relationships
- Consistency: Maintain unified structure across templates
Step 12: Ensure Readability for All Content
Confirm text legibility across contexts like device sizes, page backgrounds, font selections and more.
Readability tips:
- Contrast: Text should have at least 4.5:1 foreground to background luminance ratio. Use contrast checkers to validate sufficient difference.
- Line length: Limit line length to 70 characters max.
- Spacing: Maintain 1.5x letter height between lines.
- Responsive: Scale text appropriately from mobile to desktop.
Step 13: Review and Polish All Imagery
Audit all photos, graphics and videos for:
- Subject relevance
- Emotional impact
- Technical quality
Optimize fast performance:
- Compress file sizes using TinyPNG or services like ImageKit
- Lazy load offscreen images
- Serve modern image formats like WebP
Optimize Functionality and Core Experience
Step 14: Validate Site Responsiveness
Ensure graceful adaptation across all device sizes using responsive web design.
Responsiveness tips:
- Design mobile-first experience as base
- Expand layouts for tablet, laptop and desktop tiers
- Test across viewports and devices early and often
- Actively set breakpoints to trigger rearrangements
- Avoid horizontal scrolling which disrupts experiences
Step 15: Confirm Site Accessibility
Enable equitable access regardless of disabilities through inclusive design.
To meet AA level WCAG conformance:
- Semantics: Use proper HTML to provide context
- Keyboard access: Test solely keyboard navigation
- Color contrast: Minimum 4.5:1 text/background ratio
- Text alternatives: Offer transcripts for multimedia
- ARIA attributes: Clarify advanced interactions for screen readers
- Focus visibility: Indicate current focus element
Step 16: Speed Up Performance Benchmarks
Faster experiences improve conversions and momentum.
Performance tips:
- Page weight: Target under 2MB payload size
- Image compression: Shrink files without perceptible quality loss
- Minify: HTML/CSS/JS file size reduction
- Caching: Store static assets client-side for faster repeat access
- Async: Stagger non-essential resource loading
- CDN: Distribute assets globally from data centers
Aim for under 3s on desktop and mobile connectivity.
Step 17: Strengthen Security Posture
Reduce risk profile through protections like:
- HTTPS across site for encryption
- CSP policies to restrict external content
- Access controls to limit admin permissions
- Sitemaps to guide indexing
- Backups via services like Cloudflare Timepages
Enable via .htaccess configurations, plugins like Wordfence and host-level controls.
Step 18: Construct Conversion Funnels
Guide visitors across purpose-built pathways triggering actions like:
- Reading blog posts
- Downloading content offers
- Signing up for demos
- Making purchases
Shape journeys by:
- Optimizing page copy and visuals to motivate next steps
- Making calls-to-action clearly reflect value exchanges expected
- Placing signup option early and consistently across flows
- Reinforcing continuity using page transitions and unified styling
Validate Quality and Outcomes
Step 19: Content Audit Reviews
Scrutinize effectiveness of existing content across metrics like relevance, clarity, accuracy, depth and find areas for refinement.
Leverage systems like Alexa or tools like Hubspot‘s Website Grader to automatically assess current maturity level.
Step 20: Conduct Functionality Testing
Validate form flows, integrations, system calculations and site features pre-launch via manual verification and end-to-end software suites.
Explore test management platforms like Practitest, TestRail and Qase to organize test case administration and defect ticketing workflows.
Step 21: Confirm Mobile and Cross Browser Compatibility
Assess real world performance across target visitor‘s preferred environments given high device fragmentation.
In-depth evaluation across:
- iOS and Android devices
- Various browser types and versions
- OS scenarios like iOS, Windows, Linux and macOS
Emulate mobile experiences using throttling profiles to validate 2G-5G network conditions.
Step 22: Audit Site Speed and Security
Measure speed KPIs like Time To First Byte and First Contentful Paint with Lighthouse or WebPageTest. Confirm security protections are functioning via enhanced SSL test scans and endpoint attack simulation tools.
Step 23: Geographic Location Testing
Validate content variations and restrictions function properly based on user region. Prevent geo-targeted content, pricing or promotions from leaking outside intended audiences.
Step 24: Establish Post Launch Governance
Outline release, monitoring, research and iteration processes to continually refine site effectiveness.
Governance best practices:
- Release management: Coordinate code pushes, configuration changes, content publishing
- Performance budgets: Set thresholds for speed KPIs that trigger required optimization when exceeded
- Usage analytics: Review visitor metrics to identify underperforming areas
- Optimization testing: Evaluate and roll out experiment variants using split testing tools
- Quarterly audits: Holistic regimen covering health of codebase to security and visitor satisfaction
- Ongoing user research: Interviews and surveys to solicit feedback for improvements
Level Up Long Term Viability
Step 25: Enrich With Automation
Orchestrate personalized experiences powered by visitor identity and behaviors.
Options like:
- Email/SMS workflows in response to actions
- Individualized content recommendations
- Custom audiences for promotions
- Segmented customer reporting
Requires a solid analytics foundation and unified data layer to monitor engagement then activate scenarios.
Step 26: Future Proof Scalability
Plan for uncertainties in business or audience demands requiring technology change.
Evaluate feasibility of migrations:
- Replatforming to new CMS or ecommerce solution
- Migrating hosting infrastructure to cloud
- Headless architecture to decouple front-end code from back end
- Shift towards microservices oriented architectures
Build in extension points for future integrations. Audit legacy liability regularly.
There you have it — a comprehensive 25-step checklist to guide your website to the cutting edge. With rigorous upfront planning, user-centric design and continual refinement, your site will establish the traction and flexibility required to support evolving demands.
By working step-by-step through each milestone, you can feel confident you have all your bases covered — avoiding the pitfalls that snag many website projects.
If any aspect of your digital presence needs leveling up, I‘m here to help. With 10+ years of professional website design and testing expertise gained working with over 3,500 device and browser combinations, I have the experience to guide your project to success.
Let‘s chat about your goals and how I can best support you in this new chapter. The possibilities lie wide open. It‘s time to seize them.
