The website building / development process can be a walk in the park or a complete nightmare. I kid you not, it's pretty daunting to organise your business into tidy little pages that'll sit there with the planet as an audience.

The first thing you should determine is the purpose of the site. Is it to get your brand out there? Is it to sell from the site? Is it to recruit members? Is it to generate sales? It might be a simple question, but it's a goal. This is what the site is going to be.

The next step is to figure out your target audience. If you're selling high rise buildings, then you're not going to have a site that caters to four year olds.  If you know your audience, you know their expectations and you can pitch the site that way.

Thirdly, theme. The look and feel. The shiny graphics or lack thereof should correspond to the previous two steps. I work with/wrangle/swear at Photoshop until I get something half presentable and looks like a website.

Admittedly, I don't always get the design right the first time, But that's just how it goes. It's not all bourbon and skittles, there is some work involved.

Once I've got a design I think works, the coding starts. Turning pixels into a fully functional website probably sounds easy... It's not, but it does end up with a draft page that looks, feels, functions and smells like a website. If you hate it, it's back to Photoshop for me. If you're happy with where it's going, then we keep on going, building extra pages, putting in content, until the whole project is complete.