9 steps to designing a website in 2025
Let’s go over 9 stages that you’ll go through when designing a website:
1. Define your website’s scope and goals
Whether you’re designing a website for yourself or a client, it’s important to first clearly define the website’s purpose and goals. All websites strive to deliver eye-catching design and a pleasant user experience, but they also need to reach (and grow) a target audience.
At times, clients will come to you with their purpose, goals, objectives, branding, and content complete and ready to be implemented into a CMS (content management system). However, some clients will rely on your expertise to build a new site or redesign their current one.
To define the goals and scope of a website and associated webpages, you need to know the why, the what, and the how behind it.
Why should this website exist?
Before designing a website, you need to know its primary purpose, so ask yourself — why should this website exist?
For example, if you’re building an ecommerce website, the purpose would be to list products through an online store. If you’re designing a portfolio website, the purpose would be to showcase your work.
What should this website achieve?
Once you’ve defined your why (i.e. your website’s purpose), you need to think about what you hope to achieve with this website.
For instance, if you’re building an ecommerce website, the website should help you attract your target customers and convince them to purchase your products. For a portfolio website, the achievement might be getting a potential client to visit your contact page and fill out a contact form.
How will the website serve its purpose and goals?
Once you know why your website should exist and what you hope it will accomplish, you can focus on how to turn those hopes into reality.
It’s important to consider not just how you’ll get your target audience on your website, but also how you’ll keep them there.
As you work through your design process, it’s important to consider best practices for website SEO (search engine optimization). Setting up your site so that various pages will rank well on Google is crucial if you want customers to be able to find you through search engines.
Then, think about the entire user experience and visual presentation of your website — from the top of the page, through the headers, and all the way down to the footer. Your design needs to engage site visitors right away, and keep them happy with an intuitive navigation, fast loading time, and logical layout.
2. Research and plan out content
Once you have your why, what, and how, you can start planning out written and visual content that will keep website visitors engaged.
Start by researching your competition. Browse their websites and see what you love (and what you don’t). Pay attention to the user interface (UI) and your user experience (UX). Skim their content to see what headings, visuals, or features catch your attention.
Draw inspiration from current web design trends and galleries like Dribbble or Made in Webflow. Make note of design elements, wording, or content organization that you think could serve your audience well.
After you’ve gathered your notes and insights from this research, create a mood board. If you’re working with existing images, a Pinterest board is a good option. However, if you want to dive into more detailed designs, a tool like Figma will serve you better.
Mood boards are ideal in that they allow you to consolidate your findings and transform them into a more visual representation. They can serve as a foundation for when you build your brand’s identity.
3. Design your brand identity
Brand could refer to a company or personal brand. It encompasses both your visual identity — including color scheme, typography, logo design, and your website — along with your brand’s overall personality.
If you’re designing the website for a company, they will likely have their own style and branding guidelines that dictate their brand identity including colors, fonts, logo variations, etc., which you can apply to the website design. But if you’re starting from scratch, there are some key elements to consider: color scheme, typography, imagery, and overall voice and tone.
Color scheme
Color has a profound impact on brand identity. Color meanings and psychology influence people’s perception of a brand based on color alone. Plus, background, life experience, and even what generation people are in influence color preferences.
You can use this to your advantage. Think about what emotions you want people to associate with your brand. Consider what age groups you’d like to appeal to. Let these things guide you towards a color scheme. For example, if you want to come off as trustworthy and wise and hope to reach baby boomers, you could build a website color palette around navy or cerulean blue.
Typography
Font, typeface, and typography are all related, but not interchangeable. Typefaces are like the parent — a set of glyphs or letters in a particular style. Fonts are like the kids, a variation of a typeface with a certain weight, or size. For example, Arial is a typeface while Arial Black (a bold, heavier version) is a font.
Typography involves typefaces and fonts, but refers to the overall art and design of arranging text. Take these examples from Type Fan, for instance. Both websites use typographic design to really grab your attention.
