For many entrepreneurs, your website might well be their primary point of contact with the market. It could be as simple as a landing page announcing your new product or service.
A website is essential to a company’s success, but startup entrepreneurs aren’t often web design experts. In this article, we’ll provide you with a quick introduction to get you started, as well as some pointers on what startups really need on their website to make a good first impression.
Design brief
The scope and requirements of your startup website design project are outlined in a design brief. It helps you focus on your project’s goals and priorities by laying out your vision and direction. A design brief collects data from your product or user experience plan and often contains the elements below:
Describe why your startup needs a website and what you hope to accomplish by developing one in one or two sentences. For example, if you run a cursed text generator website, you need to be clear about the various fonts that you provide to visitors. And make sure to be clear in explaining the purpose of the website. Since, this plays a vital role in grabbing the viewers’ attention at first glance.
- Business objectives: Objectives that explain what you want to achieve with your website in terms of results or outcomes. Communities like ROM Automation are a fantastic example of where you can interact with and learn from colleagues who share common hobbies, ambitions, and aspirations.
- Target audience: Explain why and how each of your target clients will engage with your website, assuming you’ve already built personas. Make a list of the top two or three items they hope to accomplish during their visit.
- Community: Here you can explain the work culture and how your employees interact with each other, on and off duty. Communities like ROM Automation are a fantastic example of where you can interact with and learn from colleagues who share common hobbies, ambitions, and aspirations. Such transparency will only help in developing a strong bond between the employees and the customers/clients.
Include a basic review of each of your top three competitors’ websites, pointing out the pros and cons of how they organise their content, how they treat their users, and how their site looks and feels.
Overall, a design brief works best when it provides just enough information to encourage research rather than prescribe precise answers.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a diagram of your website’s pages and the navigation mechanism that links them together. It establishes a framework for the organisation of your website. Your first sitemap should be simple, but as you add more specific pages and functionalities over the design process, it might become more complex.
To begin, draw a rudimentary diagram of the relationships between all of the important pages and subpages you intend to use. Your sitemap depicts all of the possible paths for a user to find information or perform a task. Your goal is to get a bird’s-eye view of how your website functions so you can figure out which pages to wireframe.
Flow of users
The steps a user takes to complete a given action, such as joining up or completing a purchase, are outlined in a user flow. Create a diagram of your major user flows to see where gaps or impediments exist between your users and perform a task effectively and successfully.
To begin, draw the flows for your website’s most important actions, or those that will convert visitors into buyers. These flows can be written as “user stories,” a word used frequently in Agile product development. This just implies using natural language to describe the process. This can help find small details that might not be seen if diagrams were the only tool used.
User flows are critical in determining your website’s minimum viable product. An MVP should contain just enough of your main features and capabilities to be usable and to allow early clients to provide feedback.
Prototype
A prototype is a mock-up of your website that allows you to experiment with how users will interact with it. Prototypes, like wireframes, can progress from low quality to high fidelity. Build simple prototypes to test with people as early as possible in the design phase.
Andcards, a coworking space software developer, offers one of the best demonstrations in the industry to give the client an idea of what they can do to improve their business. And a prototype is no different; it gives you a sense of how your user experience will feel, and it will aid you in resolving usability issues and revealing chances for improvement through user testing.
Conclusion
Startup founders must be explicit and deliberate with each design decision. In order to test your pitch with potential clients, every part of your startup’s website is variable. Although you may never get another chance to make a first impression, you can make each one count!
