The web design process in 9 steps

Here are nine steps to web design, from early planning to going live:

1. Write a brief

If there’s one golden rule in design work, it’s this: Start with a written brief. This document captures your website’s goals, project scope, and target audience, providing everyone involved with a shared understanding from the outset. The brief is the foundation of your design process. 

Your web design brief should answer key questions, like: 

• What are the goals of the site?

• Who is your target audience, and what do they need from the site? 

• Which features are essential, and which are “nice to have”? 

• What tone should the site convey, and how does it support your goals?

Write the answers to these questions in concrete, measurable terms. If you want visitors to learn about your product, specify what they should learn and which site elements will provide that information. If you have brand guidelines, include them in the brief. If you have examples of other websites that do similar things well, note them here.

You only need a blank page to get started, although there are also design brief templates available to guide you. Some designers prefer visual tools like Notion or Miro for collaborative brief making.

2. Build your project plan

With a brief in hand, you can start turning goals into a web design project plan. This outlines project phases, key milestones, responsibilities, and a timeline to guide the project through to launch. If applicable, you may also want to account for client involvement, such as providing assets, brand materials, and approvals at each stage.

Break the project into simple phases, like research, sitemap and information architecture, wireframe drafts, visual design, prototyping, testing, and launch. Each phase should end with a specific deliverable (e.g., “finalized sitemap”) and sign-off from both your team and, if needed, the client.

A project plan would be incomplete without a budget breakdown covering design hours, development time, content creation, and even third-party costs like stock photo fees, fonts, or plugins. This cost scoping work helps set realistic expectations and keeps costs from spiralling later, especially if stakeholders review and approve it up front.

Assign roles for every deliverable—like copywriting, product photos, and layouts—and list them in the plan so everyone knows who is responsible. A shared calendar with milestone deadlines can keep the entire team aligned and avoid surprises.

Review the plan with all stakeholders and agree on the schedule before the work starts. Being clear here can help prevent future bottlenecks and avoid endless revision cycles later on. 

Project management tools like Asana and Monday.com can help visualize your timeline with Gantt charts, which show tasks, durations, and dependencies, but simpler tools like Google Sheets and Calendar can also work well for keeping your project on track.

3. Create the sitemap and wireframes

Now it’s time to define your website’s structure. This step is about information hierarchy—how your web pages and their content are organized. It’s where you establish the navigational flow and the logical relationships between your site’s different sections (sitemap), and your page’s various elements (wireframes).

Start with a sitemap, a visual outline of how all your pages relate to each other. It sets up your site’s navigation, organizes content flow, and ensures users can easily find what they need from anywhere on the site. A good sitemap includes main navigation, supporting sections, and recurring areas like blogs or help pages. Tools like FlowMapp can help you create sitemaps. 

Once your sitemap is set, move on to wireframes to sketch how the pages will be laid out. A wireframe is a low-fi layout that shows the placement of elements—headlines, images, text blocks, buttons, and menus—with simple boxes and labels.

A wireframe makes it easier to adjust layout decisions before they’re committed to code. For example, you might realize your call-to-action button needs to appear higher on the page and shift the layout accordingly. Framer’s Wireframer tool allows you to quickly generate wireframes for fully responsive layouts with the help of AI.

4. Define the design system

With your sitemaps and wireframes complete, the next step is to establish design rules to ensure consistency as your project moves toward a prototype. You want to build a system of standards so that every page and component feels like part of a cohesive whole. This includes: 

• Grids

• Button appearance  

• Accessibility requirements

• Form design 

• Navigation elements and style 

• Performance thresholds, like for images

Grids

Defining your grids ensures that the elements on your page are organized and visually balanced across different screen sizes. This ties directly into breakpoints, which define when the layout should adjust based on screen width. Different screens, like phones, tablets, and computers, all require different layouts to keep content clear, readable, and usable. 

If you’re working in Framer, you’ll get responsive layouts by default, keeping you from having to manually set the breakpoints. Still, you might want to fine-tune where those breakpoint triggers happen based on your specific design, which can also be managed in Framer.

Buttons

Buttons should look pressable, not just text, and the copy should clearly explain what will happen when you click it (“Submit form” vs “OK,” for example). You’ll want to design the right contrast ratio so that the elements appear against all backgrounds on your site, and include enough padding around touch targets to ensure thumbs don’t miss on mobile. You’ll also want to define how buttons look in their default, hover, active, and disabled states to ensure consistency across the site. 

Accessibility

Build in accessibility from the start by designing your layouts for keyboard navigation, offering reduced motion options, and setting up standards for font sizes and color contrast. If a visitor can’t read a button because of color contrast, they won’t be able to interact with your site content in the way you want them to. Making sure text has good contrast, is large enough to be read on mobile, and your site has keyboard navigation and screen reader support will help everyone use your site the way it’s intended.  You can use Stark or Contrast Checker at WebAIM to test legibility and accessibility. 

Form design

You’ll want to set up your forms here to make sure they behave the same way across the whole site. You can define rules for padding, error handling, input states, and the like so that users aren’t confused as they move through these elements.

Navigation elements

The backbone of your site’s usability is its navigation. If you’re using a top bar that sticks to the top, a side panel, or even a hamburger menu, your design should feel consistent across devices. For example, when your site’s responsive design changes the full-width nav bar to a mobile hamburger menu, the presentation may change, but the same links and sense of placement within the site shouldn’t change. 

Performance

Set up some rules for image sizes across the site so that people on mobile can see what you want them to without bogging down their network connections (typically under a few hundred kilobytes for 5G/4G connections). If your designs call for animation or motion, like background video or scrolling parallax effects, use them with intention, like guiding attention or explaining an interaction. Keep motion purposeful and minimal to support usability rather than distract.

5. Choose typography and visual style

Typography anchors your visual system, and the fonts you choose for your website can convey different identities. Some font choices suggest tradition, while others convey modernity or sophistication. When building with Framer, you can use open source fonts from Framer’s own collection or upload your own custom fonts. 

Your broader visual style also includes color palettes, image use, and spacing. For color, the Palette Pro plugin for Framer can help generate and test palettes that complement your brand or imagery. You can grab the HEX code beneath any color swatch, copying it to your clipboard for use elsewhere in your designs.

When considering image style, define which types of images can be used on various surface areas—for example, where you’ll use lifestyle images vs. product shots. You can also decide to include effects that can quietly polish and reinforce your brand image, such as subtle hover states, fade-ins, or motion.

Finally, define consistent patterns for common components like forms, info cards, and image-led sections. This ensures that when different teams contribute, the site maintains a cohesive design, which is easier for users to take in. 

6. Develop a working prototype

All your planning comes together as a working prototype of your site, a version that feels and works like the final product. This shared, functional preview helps reduce confusion and circular feedback. It turns your wireframes into clickable pages with real content and working navigation and applies your visual design.

A prototype sets expectations and gives your team a solid reference for discussing details and making changes. Instead of relying on abstract ideas or static mockups, stakeholders click through the web prototype site, experience the information flow, and see how pages connect. 

You can tweak your typography at this step in the process, including size, letter and line spacing, and contrast as you see how your planning works or doesn’t on a working site. You can make sure you still have a clear hierarchy between headings, subheadings, and body text, as that makes content easier to scan and helps unify your site’s look and feel. 

A prototype gives you the freedom to experiment a little, giving you the time to refine your flow before you commit to code. When building in Framer, you can turn your designs into a working prototype using the preview feature.  

7. Collect feedback and refine

Feedback is an essential part of the web design process, from internal teams to client stakeholders. Designers use tools like UserTesting or Maze for structured usability testing, and Trello or Notion for managing document-based feedback. Even simple tools like Google Forms can gather guided responses and compile survey data. 

Ask targeted questions about key areas:

• Is the navigation clear and intuitive?

• Is the typography readable across devices?

• Does the layout align with the target audience’s expectations?

• Does the design reflect the goals defined in the initial brief?

  
  

Just as important as gathering feedback is organizing it. Centralize all responses in one place so you can easily review and act on them. Group similar comments, note what’s in or out of scope for the current design phase, and document any decisions made based on the feedback. This keeps the process focused on the plan and the brief, and avoids “design by committee”—a project with many designers but no unifying vision. 

8. Test across devices and prepare for SEO

Now that you have your final website design, you’ll want to test it on phones, tablets, and computer monitors as well as on different connection speeds. This differs from the prototype page, as this is the actual coded site. You’ll typically have it ready to go at a private address on the server, not as a live site. This is also known as a staging domain, as it works just like your live site, but isn’t publicly accessible. 

In staging, check the site again for accessibility, using a combination of automated checking tools and real humans to make sure it can be used by a person with color blindness or one who uses a screenreader, for example.

Test performance at this stage, too, make sure all your pages load as quickly as possible so that your visitors don’t bounce when they are kept waiting too long. There are several automated tools that can help you see where you can improve site speed, like PageSpeed Insights.

Ensure the SEO basics are in place. This includes: 

• Checking that your HTML sitemap is up to date

• Ensuring each page has a clear content hierarchy using HTML tags

• Making sure all images are properly compressed

• Setting videos to lazy-load

Framer handles these items for you automatically. Additionally, you’ll want to write keyword-optimized meta descriptions for each page and ensure all images have alt text, as this helps with accessibility and helps search engines understand your content in different contexts.

Now you can offer up the site for a final review by all involved. When these checks are complete, the project is ready for launch.

9. Launch the website

In Framer, publishing your site is incredibly simple. If you’ve used the Staging tab to test your site, you can now switch to the Production tab and hit Deploy latest. If you’re not using the PRO plan, you can just hit the Publish button when ready. 

But once you turn on public access, you’re not done. Take a final pass at the site to make sure it matches your approved prototype (just to make sure you haven’t missed anything), that your forms send their submissions to the right spot, and that your links go to where you want them to. 

Set up SSL, as well, since most visitors, especially on ecommerce sites, will look for secure access as a trust signal. You can get an SSL certificate at places like Let’s Encrypt and set up a redirect rule from http:// to https://. Framer can also set you up with a certificate and a redirect rule.

Once the site is live, you can stay on it and make sure any small overlooked issues can be fixed when your first visitors start using the site in earnest. Make sure your analytics tools are set up so the team can watch how the site is used.

Once launched, you can add a quick wrap note to attach to the project that sums up what was shipped and how it compares to what was planned. You can add a note about what else can be scheduled for later, and how that might be accomplished.

Framer makes the web design process seamless

Following a structured web design process gives every project a clear path from concept to launch, keeps collaboration focused, helps decisions stick, and reduces costly missteps along the way. 

Framer supports this process with built-in tools that feel familiar, combining precise design controls, interactive previews, and full publishing capabilities in one platform. When you’re ready to build, there’s no handoff to engineering—only the push of a button. Explore Framer’s design features, or sign up to start building in a way that matches how you already work.