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The coding process is complex and there are a lot of fault lines. Ensure you minimize costs, reduce miscommunication, and streamline the process. Preparing your design for coding will not only save you from considerable headaches, but it’ll also save you money
Have you spent a considerable time crafting the perfect design and you’re excited to start the development stage? Seeing the design you’ve spent hours upon hours on come to life would make anyone excited, but you shouldn’t rush things. In this article, we’ll explore a few key ways you can prepare your design for the coding process.
Iron Out the Finer Details of the Design
Although the practice of setting coordinates and sizes of elements up to the specific pixel location on the screen has largely died off in the last 5 years, and most experienced developers use a more flexible approach to ensure compatibility on many devices and proper UX, still, anyone familiar with coding designs knows that it is a very precise task, and the relative coordinates need to be very specific if you want the design to come out as intended.
This is why you need to make sure you’re extra precise with the measurements and don’t overlook the finer details of the design. Designers often care more about their vision and try to get the outline right while compromising on specificity and concrete details. While this might make the design look better in Photoshop/Figma/etc., it makes the coding process more complicated and complex.
Make Use of the Note Function in the Design Software
Since most designers are so engrossed in the design process, they think their designs are really easy and intuitive to understand. But, sadly, a lot of coders aren’t as familiar with the design software and processes and have a much harder time grasping the intricacies of designs. This is the cause of many hiccups during the development process as miscommunication happens.
Thankfully, all three design apps we’ve mentioned in the title of this article have ‘note’ functionality, which allows you to add descriptive comments anywhere on the design. Although the finer details might differ from one program to the next, they all are capable of handling an essential function: allowing you to leave notes and comments to explain the finer details of your design.
If you truly make use of this functionality, you’ll have a much smoother experience with the PSD to WordPress services you might regularly rely on as miscommunication and development hiccups will be kept to a minimum with a design with an apt. amount of notes. This ultimately will save you money and time.
Think the Fundamental Way You Approach Designing Through
Have you ever spent hours upon hours designing a single page and ensuring it is perfect without paying attention to the site as a whole? Have you spent a lot of time designing a landing page that was wildly different from your other landing pages? If you said yes to either of these two questions, you likely are approaching web design in a flawed way.
Sadly, it is pretty common — some of the ways designers approach web design is fundamentally flawed, irreconcilable with the reality of the web, and constrains the coders’ ability to create good websites. One of the most common ones is designers approaching the design of a page at a time and not as a holistic system that will function together.
What we mean by this is that a website is a single platform that users expect consistency and reliability from, and many designers miss the forest for the trees by focusing on individual components/pages/forums too much. This makes for great individual designs, but when it is time to put them all together, the result looks random and tacky.
If you’re thinking about hiring a WordPress services agency to turn your design into code, we strongly recommend you look at the overall looks and feels of the design beforehand and ensure everything goes together well. Higher-quality services will tell you about the problem before they start coding your project, but you might not always be working with a high-quality agency.
Design with WordPress in Mind and Make Sure You Familiarize Yourself with the Technology
It is no secret that all content management systems and web development frameworks have their design philosophy and approach, and this stems from both the differing philosophies on what a website should look like and on hard technical differences between the various platforms. WordPress, despite its flexibility, is no different.
WordPress has specific strengths and features that could be powerful if leveraged fully, and this is done partly at the design stage as well:
- Blocks: due to WordPress’s new editor, it treats each web element as a customizable block. If you incorporate the same philosophy in your design, you’ll be able to ensure better compatibility and speed up the coding process. Software like Adobe XD are already optimized for workflows like this, which is great if you need an Adobe XD to WP service later on in the development stage of your website.
- Components: another design philosophy that’s massively successful with WordPress is a component-esque approach. It is gaining a lot of popularity recently. It includes approaching web design in terms of components on the page: for example, you have a contact form component, you have a slide-show component displaying porducts, etc.
- Page templates: WordPress works well if you create your design as a specific theme/template. This could speed up the coding process and make later customization much easier. WordPress is much less suitable if you want to make each landing page look different.
- Instead of recreating these components on each page, it is much more effective to create one component template and then reusing it on each page. This approach saves you a lot of time and helps you decrease maintenance time while increasing the quality of your website.
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