A Whiter Shade of Pale, please

Web design is funny stuff. And we've been finding lately that many clients need a bigger helping hand than we thought in figuring out the process of developing and launching a site. For our lack of explanations in the past, we apologize to clients both past and present.

To help you with the process, we'll be covering some of the processes in this and future issues of the CommuniCreations Update.

Session 1: The First Review

When a site is first developed, we typically provide a couple of static images of the home page. This allows you to see how the navigation is arranged, the colors we'd like to use and the general brand we're trying to get across for your business or organization. At this junction, it is vital to pay attention to three things: 1) did we get the navigation correct? 2) do you like the type we selected?, and 3) are the colors correct?

Of these, color is the most important factor to ensure it is correct. This initial home page serves as the base design for the rest of the site. Once you buy off on the home page design, we use its graphic files to develop the rest of the site. So if you change you mind on the color after we build out other portions of the site, we have to change hundreds of files rather than the one we did for the home page. That consumes time and budget.

So how do we arrive at color schemes? Most of the time the family of colors, or palette, is based on your logo and your existing marketing pieces. Using these, we select complementary colors in the family. This ensures that the colors don't clash with one another. Another factor is that in the Web world, there are only 233 colors that look good on everyone's computer. There are some tricks that allow us to use more, but the choices are more limited than print.

If you don't have established colors, this creates a need that is outside of the web design process. This is a branding issue and we'd probably want to discuss your overall marketing, logo, graphics standards and objectives separate from the actual design of the site. This speeds up the process immeasurably.

Give us a call if you have any questions about this stage of the process. Next month we'll cover the second phase of a web site's construction and build out and show you ways to streamline the process further.