What is the web design process, step by step?

1. Discovery

A call or two to understand the business: who your customers are, how they find you, what a good enquiry looks like, what competitors do well. The discovery phase ends with a written scope and a fixed price. If someone quotes without asking these questions, they’re guessing.

2. Structure and content

Next comes the page list and the order of information on each page, sometimes sketched as a wireframe. This is also when copy gets written or gathered. It’s tempting to skip to visuals. Resist it. A layout designed around placeholder text often breaks when real words arrive.

3. Design

Usually the homepage is designed first, since it sets type, colour, spacing and tone for everything else. You review it, give feedback, and the direction gets refined. Then the inner pages follow the established system. Good feedback here is specific: “the services section feels crowded” helps more than “make it pop”.

4. Development

The design becomes a working site. This is where speed, accessibility, mobile layouts, forms, schema markup and analytics are built in. You’ll often get a private preview link to click around before anything goes public.

5. Testing and launch

Checks on real phones and browsers, form tests, redirects from old URLs, a sitemap submitted to Search Console, and a final read for typos. Then the domain is pointed at the new site. The first week after launch is for watching, not celebrating: broken links and missing redirects show up there.

My process follows this shape over three to four weeks for most sites. I design and build in close loops, so you see real pages early rather than a big reveal at the end. You review on your own phone, not in a slide deck.

The part I’d urge any client to take seriously is content. If the words are ready by the end of week one, everything after runs smoothly.