Well, this is an old topic: web design is at least a topic since there are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or even earlier. Nevertheless do I want to present you some hints and tips from my point of view, what a good design for a business site is. This idea has evolved in my current background, as I have recently changed the company and my employer is also thinking about a relaunch/modernisation of his homepage. So this is the reason I have chosen such an outdated (or should I say evergreen) topic.
The idea behind this is to have at the end a series of blog posts, which cover different sites as they come into my mind and to evaluate the positive and the negative sides of a design.
I hope this will be an interesting series for my readers to follow me and that we might have some kind of discussion.
As a starter, I want to give a short introduction into the normal "process" of the creation or the relaunch of a business web site.
The business way of creating a homepage
There are, in opposite to a private homepage, different processes going on, when a business homepage is developed. Various roles and departments are included in the decision and the initial discussion:
- Marketing: Controlling content and maybe layout. Providing in most cases staff for content creation (content managers).
- Governance: Controlling content and compatibility to current corporate identity (CI).
- IT: Providing resources for hosting and development, maybe also staff for maintenance of web server and CMS.
- Accounting/Finance: Controlling budget for mandate.
- Management: Principal of the mandate (has to agree).
In some companies this is an easy task, especially for SMBs (Small and Medium Business) where one person has multiple roles. It happens that in some cases less departments/roles are involved, so the list above is only illustrative.
But this shows already that a web designer has to deal with multiple stakeholders and all of them will have an influence on the outcome. So it is important to have a clear setting at the beginning of the development cycle. This means, that every one knows exactly for which area she or he is responsible and that the designer knows from whom he (or she) can take orders.
This are the most vital prerequisites for a successful design-process. There are, depending on the situation many more, which have to be dealt with on a per case basis. A workflow like this makes a designer and developer as flexible as possible and does not create to much overhead (i.e. has standardised elements, which save time and money).
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