Infographic: The Client's Guide to Creating a Website

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/infographic-behind-scenes-guide-creating-website-clients/
Today, a website is the first place potential customers and partners come to when they want to know more about your business. It’s your primary interface with the online world and perhaps your best salesman. Just like with any other business asset, you need to do the due-diligence and make sure your website provides a worthwhile return on your investment.

Before you go looking for a web studio or developer to create your site, it helps to understand what goes into actually creating a website. This infographic gives an overview of the web development process so that you can make a more informed decision about the web studio or developer to choose, and later on, engage better with them.

For a more detailed break down of the website creation process, check out this article.

Did we miss anything? Has this infographic helped you understand how websites are built? Have you passed this on to your non-web developer friends or clients?
Continue reading this article on SitePoint

This is a great, concise infographic! If I were to suggest any improvements, it would be to address the content side of the equation. It’s the hardest part of any web project, and in many cases takes longer than the web development itself. In fact, a great design will build around the available content (as opposed to fitting content into a Lorem Ipsum design), so it should come early, definitely before design & development, likely around or shortly after site planning. For this step, consider both written content as well as photos (custom photography, stock), videos (videography, third party content), and major tools or features (e.g. the Behr ColorSmart application is a great example of the application itself being the “content” of the site.)

Totally agree! I think design, code and content, all three have to come together for a good website. I wanted to keep the infographic simple and clear - something we can easily share with a client. The criteria for good content probably deserves a post by itself. Let me see if I can do one.

I agree, but that would be a whole infographic on its own.

Turns out we do have some great articles related to selecting and creating good content. Hop over and take a look at these:

http://www.sitepoint.com/content-strategy-mobile-web-design/
http://www.sitepoint.com/non-writers-guide-writing-web/

Do you think these cover it?
I’ll try to chalk it out in an infographic as well.
What else would you like to see wrt creating great content?

Thanks for the guide! I recently create a website for my small project using free templates (http://www.webbuildersguide.com/free-website-builders/ ), I guess now I am ready for learning something new)

I love info-graphics. They are attractive, easy to understand, don’t consume much time and consists of loads of information about a particular subject.

I circulated the link for this article around our development team this morning - I must have tweaked someone’s tail, as the next this I got was a query as to whether I was planning a career change… :smile:

Glad it you liked it!

Lol! Why not join the web dev team ? :wink:

Very risky, don’t want to embarrass the poor lambs… they still think IE6 is a thing :flushed:

Woah! Seriously?
You may want to discretely share this: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Or perhaps take a print, and stick it up somewhere they can see, anonymous of course.

Semi-seriously - we actually have IE9 everywhere, but technique doesn’t necessarily seem to have moved on much. Heaven forbid you should want to view their stuff in anything other than IE - web standards? What are those again?

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Nice infographic. Wouldn’t hesitate to pass it out to clients and circulate it if it didn’t leave off the specific step of defining the functional requirements of the site (content types, taxonomies, special functionality) during the discovery phase. I can’t build it if I don’t know what it is, and choosing an “infrastructure” is just way to vague for what that is meant to represent. Most clients are going to see that and think “pick my CMS.”

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