Web design basics for first-time website buyers

Who this is for

Someone who is about to commission a website design project and has not done it before. The vocabulary is the first obstacle: a web design supplier will use perhaps thirty words as though they were common knowledge, and several of them mean different things to different suppliers.

These pages define those words in the order you are likely to meet them, and explain what each stage of a project actually requires from you. Most projects that stall do so because an input only the client can supply did not arrive, not because anyone lacked skill.

What the web design basics pages cover

Five pages, each answering one question a first-time web design buyer meets before they can read a quote.

freelancer vs agency covers the shapes of supplier available and, more usefully, how much unbilled coordination each one hands back to you.

How long a website actually takes separates the working time a supplier quotes from the elapsed time you will actually experience — they are rarely the same number, and the gap is where most frustration lives.

Website revisions explained sets out how refinement is bounded in a fixed-price build, and where the line sits between a revision, a change of direction, and new scope.

Scope creep, and the variation process that prevents it is the same subject from the other side: how a sequence of small reasonable requests turns an eight-week project into a five-month one, and the mechanism that lets scope change on the record instead.

What you actually get at the end is the inventory. Most quotes describe a process; very few describe what you receive, and the inventory is what you are buying.

Where the rest of the web design detail lives

This cluster is orientation, not reference. Once the vocabulary is in place, the detail belongs to the sections that cover it properly, and each of those is considerably deeper than a summary here would be:

• The web design discipline itself, and what the phrase covers — what web design is
• Every stage of a build, including wireframing, sign-off, launch and handover — the website build process, end to end
• Writing a brief and defining scope before going to market — writing a website brief
• Sitemaps, page lists and how a site is arranged — website structure and information architecture
• Content management systems, builders and what each one commits you to — the platforms guide

Web design vocabulary: principles, visual hierarchy and best practices

A supplier’s proposal — whether the supplier is a freelancer or a web design agency — uses a second vocabulary alongside the process terms above: design principles, not process. Visual hierarchy is the deliberate use of size, weight and spacing to guide users through a page in the order that matters most, not colour alone. Best practices is shorthand for the conventions users already expect — a logo that links home, a phone number in the header — and departing from one should be a considered choice, not an oversight. The key elements a designer references are layout, typography, colour and imagery, and each is judged against the page’s purpose rather than personal taste. None of this vocabulary is difficult. It is simply rarely explained before a brief assumes you already have it.

The one thing worth knowing first

Almost every expensive surprise in a website project traces back to something that was never written down. Not a dispute about quality — a disagreement about what was included. The brief and the handover inventory are the two documents that prevent it, and they are the two most often skipped.

If you only read one thing

The brief and the handover inventory. Everything else in a website project can be corrected as you go; those two documents decide what “finished” means, and a project without them ends when somebody runs out of patience rather than when the work is complete.