subject: Putting Your Creativity To Website Design: How To Manage Web Design Projects [print this page] Managing projects in website design is a vital skill to have. As the guy in charge of the outcome, you have to think about what goals you need to achieve for your clients, how they will be met and in what order. This form of thinking will help you be more organised, think more clearly and will enable you to meet your clients needs.
When you commence on any project youll need to communicate with the clients first of all. Through this meeting identify their goals, their unique business angle and their target audience. Then make sure you have a point of contact where you will get your resources and information from. For communication and project management purposes, its key that you have a liaison within the business who you can speak to.
Subsequently to this, youll be coming up with ideas for the website design. You could do a design board with a few ideas or a sketch of each design, or if total restructuring is required complete sketches of sitemaps. As part of this process, you should be thinking about whats most important to the website and what is not. At this stage, you should only be thinking about the main structure and functionality of the website and showing examples of this to the clients in the form you choose (sketches, test website etc).
After discussing the main structure, its time to meet with clients to chat about content. Content writing is a lengthy process and will take up a large amount of the clients time, leaving you time to begin the base design. After creating the base design, free up time in your calendar where you can meet with clients and readjust the design in accordance with their thoughts. The feedback process can be lengthy, as you may have to go backwards and forwards, adjusting the design, until they are happy. At this stage, make sure you manage your time well and keep in constant contact with clients.
Now you can get to the fun part, designing the rest of the websites layout. Each time you successfully complete a stage of the design process, have your liaison within the clients company, take a look over the design and send you any necessary pictures, videos or content. Once the design layout is fully agreed upon, you can then begin to create the website (in html/CSS). Then its off for another round of feedback (after the creation of the website) where any adjustments can be made. After confirmation, the website will need to be checked over for errors or any technical issues before going live.
Project management for web design needs a number of skills, the most important of being:
