SixCrayons

As a web designer, designing (or re-designing) your own website should, in theory, be a piece of cake, as opposed to dealing with the occasional eccentricities of some clients.

I’m sure most of you could regale us with countless stories of unrealistic demands from clients or how you’ve anxiously awaited feedback on a design only to get blown out of the water. Forewarned with those experiences you would think that we surely must be a breeze to work for…

Not so. My name is Chris and I am my own worst client. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more stressful project to work on than redesigning my personal site. I would have fired myself if only I wasn’t attached. My own erratic behaviour included approving work one minute and hating it the next, spending ages building sections of the site only to demand they be re-written because I’d used too many classes and so on and so forth.

So why am I so bad at being a client?

Because I didn’t approach the job in the same way as I would for an external client. Before embarking on any type of design project it’s important to have some form of brief, ensuring you and the client are both on the same page. My normal approach for a job would be to then go through a clearly defined process to fully explore the clients needs and ensure that I can meet them. This isn’t how I approached this job – I was trying to be a smart-arse.

I had assumed I knew myself and what I do well enough to skip these first steps. But in doing this I had unwittingly caused this cycle of self-loathing which got me nowhere. I can see why studios like Squared Eye brought in outside help for their redesign. I should have known better.

So in an effort to spare you the stress and strains that I felt, I thought I’d share 3 top tips I hope you will bear in mind when embarking on your own re-design. I promise it will be a smoother process as a result.

1. Have a clear design brief written down

You wouldn’t dream of taking on a client project without a clear brief, so why would you design for yourself without one? Erskine Design set aside time, appointed lead personnel and scheduled regular meetings for their re-design; effectively treating it like a live client project. You need to clearly get down in writing your aims and objectives for the site. I sometimes find it helpful to create a one-sentence summary of the project’s goals and aims so that every time I think of adding something I first think does this fit my summary? – if so keep it, if not get rid of it. Which leads nicely onto…

2. Throw out everything you don’t need

Feature creep is a notorious problem that plagues the most experienced designers and developers. The key here is going through your existing site and asking yourself does this add value to my site? Saying more with less is a laudable goal in this case.

3. Ditch Photoshop until the end is in sight

I made the mistake of coming up with half-formed ideas, then excitedly jumping into Photoshop to mock up the design. Then, when I came to coding it I would invariably encounter layout problems that would not have occurred if I’d spent enough time planning.

Paper and pencil is your friend here – ensure you sketch your ideas loosely but consider everything, for example how much detail will you include in the portfolio? or how much content will you show on the homepage? Only when you have visually considered your whole site should you open up Photoshop.

What do you think? Do you have any top tips to ensure a stress-free redesign? Let us know in the comments.