Behind-the-scenes: the checks we run on your website design before you see it
By Melissa
One of my favourite things about being a Pomegranite is our systems. We review them almost daily and making an improvement to one of our processes…well that just gives me all the feels.
I recently unpacked my Monica Gellar-type brain to give the project management team a refresher on the process for reviewing website mock-ups, and the importance of this before the client sees our proposal for their new website. (Segway to another of my favourite Pomegranite things: our first view of how the web designers have interpreted the brief, the organisation’s vision and how they have used the client’s content to inform the design and UX of the site. The result is always beyond what I had envisioned. Every. Single. Time.)
Here’s a breakdown of our approach:
Step one
We immerse ourselves in the proposed design to get a good sense of the overall look and feel before getting down to the smaller details.
Step two
Most clients have a brand guide and we need to adhere to these guidelines. This ranges from checking pantone colours to fonts to how much space should be left around a logo.
Step three
The client will have approved the content brief before the designer received it, but we check that all of the content has been included and assess how it flows from a UX perspective.
Step four
Proofreading. We’re human, the designers are human. Spelling and grammatical errors can appear on the mock-up which weren’t originally part of the content brief.
Step five
Images are a powerful tool, and can make or break a site. Whether the client has shared a library of images or we’ve sourced stock images on their behalf, we make sure that the images are used accurately and reflect the content alongside them. This includes assessing the image quality and how they have been resized to fit the space – low resolution and poorly cropped images (think team photo with a headless back row) are a no-no.
Step six
One final run-through of the overall design from a spacing, padding and alignment perspective. We want to make sure things aren’t too tight, the spacing makes sense from a UX perspective and text, for example, is aligned consistently throughout the design.
We then brief any changes to the designer before sharing the mock-up with the client for their first view. Which leads me to another of my favourite Pomegranite things: hearing from the client that they’re as obsessed with the designs as we are.