...but not those of your site visitors and not one that will take you into the future. Think about Information flow, usability, architecture and growth. Enhancing user experience to increase the effectiveness of your website. Users should be considered throughout the design process, usability should not be an afterthought.

Specifications
Ensure you have covered all possibilities and understand exactly what functionalities your site must have. Start planning your content. graphics, copy, images, all these elements are critical in ensuring your site portrays the right image and offers the relevant information. Often this is what slows the process down and causes frustration for both client and developer. A professional web site copywriter is an important part of the team.
Design - Content - Visual Appeal
This is the graphical look and feel of the site. This is normally what most people think of when they refer to ‘web design’. Don’t get caught up with the visual appeal alone, this is just the face of the site, there is so much more to the functionality that needs to be agreed before you get to this stage

Launch - Visability & Marketing
We all know that it is NOT just a case of ‘build it and they will come’. The website needs to be marketed and it can only be marketed effectively if the underlying SEO principles have been kept in mind right from the start. Ensure you allow a marketing budget to get the best ROI for the site - decide on the best Internet Marketing strategies for building links and traffic and then go forth and execute (the visibility strategy, that is).

Usability

• Testing and fixing a website after it has been built is inefficient and unlikely to produce good results. The best approach to take is to incorporate a model of “pervasive usability” into your design and production process.
• The benefits of user friendly usability are:
• Increased end-user satisfaction
• Increased end-user productivity, success, and completion
• Highlight your content/product and service are then easily accessible
• Reduced long-term development costs (costs incurred from fixing poorly designed products)
• Reduced training and support costs
• Return business to improve your competitiveness
• Creating the site, including all dynamic and interactive elements