Creating a website: 5 steps to define your project
By Pixit
A website can look excellent while leaving everyone unsure what to do next. At Pixit, we prefer answering that question before choosing an animation. These five steps take a website project from its first purpose to a genuine enquiry received after launch.
1. Define the intended result
Write one sentence describing the website’s job: “help a prospect understand our offer and request an appointment”. Then choose the main action. An enquiry, a purchase and access to a customer account require different journeys.
Identify the audience, the languages needed and who will approve each stage. For an Israeli audience, plan Hebrew content and right-to-left reading from the start.
Consider a hypothetical business receiving many enquiries outside its scope. Its goal might be to explain its services more clearly rather than maximise the number of contacts. That changes the writing, the form and the way success should be assessed.
2. List pages and content
Create a table showing each page’s purpose, content, images and owner. Distinguish a new layout from a page that reuses an existing template.
Expanding a five-page site to twelve pages is more than adding seven URLs. Specify extra templates, writing, translations and functionality. Agree their cost before implementation, along with the number of review rounds included.
Give each page a decision to support: understand an offer, compare approaches or start an enquiry. If two pages do exactly the same job, question the separation. If one page answers ten unrelated questions, it may need a more useful structure.
3. Validate the journeys and design
Try a prototype of the main journey on a phone: find the service, understand the offer and contact the business. Check long French headings and Hebrew alignment.
The deliverable should be a set of approved screens using real content. Placeholder text can hide problems that will only emerge during development.
Ask someone outside the project to try the prototype without commentary. Give them a service to find and an enquiry to prepare. Observe before explaining. A design that needs its creator standing beside every visitor still has a few things to resolve.
4. Build and check
Prepare a test list: keyboard navigation, a form submitted and received, visible confirmation, mobile layouts and links between languages. Also check page titles, URLs and content in the initial HTML.
For a redesign, inventory the old URLs before replacing them. Each useful old page needs a relevant successor or an explicit retirement, rather than an automatic redirect to the homepage.
Keep an issue list with priorities: a lost enquiry blocks launch; a minor spacing adjustment may wait. Assign each item and agree how it will be checked. A shared list is more reliable than a final flurry of screenshots scattered across messages.
5. Plan the launch and what follows
Before launch, assign ownership of domain, hosting and measurement tools. Prepare a backup, a rollback procedure and a person responsible for monitoring.
After launch, test a real enquiry again and check for errors. Agree who will update the content and handle maintenance: the project continues once the website is published.
Prepare a short repeatable launch check: open priority pages, switch language, send the form and confirm receipt. Keep access details and the restoration procedure available to the responsible team. The last project stage needs an owner, not only a date.
