Web design is more than how something looks. A good site has to communicate clearly, load correctly, guide the visitor, collect feedback, and survive the handoff from designer to client.
These free Process Street web design process templates give you repeatable checklists for the work behind that outcome: animation, social media images, usability testing, client onboarding, UX, brand identity, headers, logos, and launch QA.
“a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.” – Goran Paunovic, covering this Forrester report in The Bottom Line: Why Good UX Design Means Better Business
Over the course of these 13 templates, we have documented the common web design processes, tasks, and actions that need to run smoothly every time. These include:
- Animation Design Process
- Social Media Image Design
- Usability Test Plan
- Usability Testing Template
- Blog Image Design Process
- Web Design Process
- Website Design Client Onboarding Template
- UX Design Process
- Brand Identity Design
- Header Design
- Graphic Design Process
- Logo Design Process
- Website Launch Checklist
All of these are free, ready to use, and editable. Use them as written, or adapt the tasks, approvals, and handoffs to make every design amazing without relying on memory.
13 web design process templates
Animation Design Process
Having a set process for creating an animation is, in one sense, impossible. The sheer variation in methods, programs, inspiration, styles, and purposes for an animation project is too vast to create a step-by-step process that is always applicable.
Creativity can’t always be fully documented in a single process. That’s why this animation checklist doesn’t try to.
Instead, this animation design process is perfect for guiding you through the creation of an animation on a technical level. This template provides you with a structure to help you track the project’s status and what you need to do next without stifling your creativity within the tasks themselves.
From storyboards and animation to scripting and audio mixing, there’s a guide for every animation element in this animation process.
Social Media Image Design
This social media image design checklist uses our conditional logic feature to show you the tasks you need to work through to create the perfect design for your chosen social media platform.
Let’s say you want to create an image for Facebook and Twitter but have no interest in other platforms. Standard process templates would list the guidelines for all social media platforms at once and expect you to sift through to find the relevant tasks.
This checklist adapts to your needs to display only the things you need to know, such as ideal image sizes and file types for your chosen platforms.
Usability Test Plan
When 50% of consumers abandoned a potential purchase in a recent six-month period because they could not find sufficient product information, you know that your designs are failing. That’s why it’s vital to perform usability tests and find out how to improve your work without being clouded by your own bias.
Sadly, you can’t just dive in and expect to have reliable, useful, consistent results. That’s why this usability test plan exists.
Use this template to successfully and consistently plan and set up relevant, useful, and measurable usability tests. From defining your scope to choosing your participants to reflect your target audience and success metrics to reflect the needs of the test, use this usability test plan to continually improve your work.
Usability Testing Template
From forming the plan to the test itself, our usability testing template guides you through the best, most consistent way to put your plan into action and get reliable results.
Designed to be run on the day of your test, this process guides you through everything from your last-minute checks and preparations to how you should interact with test participants to avoid affecting the results. It doesn’t matter whether you’re focusing on critical errors or subjective metrics – this process has instructions for and room to record them all.
Blog Image Design Process
Distinct from the graphic design process, this blog image design process does precisely that; provide a set process to consistently create images that will serve any purpose a blog owner could desire.
After all, we all know how confusing image rights can be – without a clear rights and review step, there is always a chance the pictures you use could create legal risk that costs more than the image was worth. Using this checklist, however, you can consistently create great images for your blog or that of a client.
Much like the animation process from earlier in this template pack, the template won’t stifle your creativity by locking you into a set doctrine of image creation. Instead, it provides the framework you can use to structure your methods and make sure that everything gets done correctly every time.
Web Design Process
Since web design is such a huge part of modern design, we created this web design process to let designers work collaboratively with their clients to streamline the whole process.
There’s nothing worse than an isolated process which forgets to consult your client. This checklist avoids that by getting them involved and allowing for feedback to be given throughout the process.
It also means less work for the designer, since there’s a much lower chance that the client will flat-out reject the design once it’s done. They’ve had their input heard throughout the process, which is consistent and efficient in its execution, so there’s no way for the project to go too far without their approval of the work in progress.
Website Design Client Onboarding Template
“[Improving] our customer onboarding experience [helped] increase our activation rate from 15% to 75% over two years” – Will Egan, CMO at Ausmed, How this e-learning company 5x their customer onboarding conversions
Happy clients make for good business. In fact, they make up the largest section of your promoters, netting you more business without the need to pay for marketing. If you want the broader operating model behind this step, use our client onboarding guide alongside the web design client onboarding template below.
That’s why it’s important to have a website design client onboarding template.
This will guide you through everything from a new client requesting a project to getting to work on the project itself. That way you can provide as much value as possible and make sure that their expectations are realistic. It’ll also help you get some initial background knowledge on the client and their business, which can work wonders when producing your design.
UX Design Process
The UX design process is as vital as it is complex. Relying on mountains of user research and testing, the idea of cultivating and improving your users’ interactions and behaviors is far from easy to carry out, let alone organize.
Enter our very own UX design process.
As with our other complex processes, this provides easy instructions for you to follow to help your client measure and influence their UX to get a better reaction out of their target audience. Whether you’re experienced or just starting out, this template provides the structure you need to consistently give your clients great service with their UX design.
Brand Identity Design
Branding, as any experienced designer or marketer will know, is an incredibly powerful tool. Whether it’s a slogan like “I’m lovin’ it” or a particular shade of purple for the wrapper of your chocolate bars, forming and/or overhauling your brand’s image takes a lot more than simply re-naming it and calling it a day.
Logos, slogans, colors, interactions, personalities and more all go into creating a public perception of you. That is your brand identity – the core of what your customers and audience see you as.
Which is why having a set brand identity design process is crucial.
Despite this checklist being aimed at a marketing company aiming to overhaul its brand, the lessons and basic framework here can be easily edited to target other companies such as retail or a straight-up design company working for clients. With instructions to guide you, space to record variables and much more, there’s little better to help you structure your brand identity design efforts.
Header Design
It’s easy to forget that someone needs to think about and design the navigational flow of your website. Without that care it’s easy to end up with a website that battles your audience as they struggle to find the page and information they want.
Congratulations, that’s an uncountable number of lost sales thanks to your website’s header and navigation being subpar.
On the other hand, this header design checklist will guide you through the process of gathering information about similar headers, analyzing them to see what works well, and creating an effective navigational flow in your header while cutting the fat that doesn’t need to be there.
Don’t let your viewers get lost before they even interact with your site. Give them the header they deserve.
Graphic Design Process
“Graphic design” is a very widespread term, making it difficult to pin down to a specific project. That doesn’t mean, however, that we were going to create a pack of design templates without including our own checklist that does just that.
This graphic design process helps you balance everything you need to do to deliver effective images to your clients (or for your own internal use). From understanding and managing the purpose, motivation, and expectation behind the project to using them to fuel an effective and fitting image, this process has got your back.
Logo Design Process
Logos are a vital part of branding – so much so that there’s an entire board game based on how well you remember brands, mostly from images of their products or partial snapshots of the logo.
Instant recognition and memorability is the power of an effective logo, which is exactly what this logo design process is aimed to help you create.
By providing specific tasks to work on for the designer and client, this template makes getting direct feedback and working together easy while preventing confusion from stopping progress.
Website Launch Checklist
While not entirely limited to design tasks, this website launch checklist is so broad and useful in creating and launching a website that we couldn’t not include it.
If you’re called in to create a website but want a more overall view than the web design process alone, use this checklist to get the job done without the hassle of having to be an expert on every issue yourself. With instructions on everything from content to testing to marketing and more, there’s something for everyone looking to launch a successful website here.
Give structure to your success
These web design process templates give you the structure to plan creative work, collect client feedback, test the experience, and launch without missed steps. Use them with our broader set of design processes and checklists when you need repeatable work across more than one design discipline.
Process Street is a Compliance Operations Platform for teams that need critical work to run the same way every time. Docs, Ops, and Cora help turn procedures into governed workflows, assign the work, enforce approvals, and keep a record of what happened.
Web design process FAQs
What is a web design process template?
A web design process template is a repeatable checklist for the steps behind a website project, from discovery and research to wireframes, visual design, usability testing, client approval, and launch checks.
Why use a checklist for web design work?
A checklist keeps creative work from depending on memory. It makes sure research, feedback, accessibility checks, QA, and client approvals happen before the project moves forward.
Which template should I start with?
Start with the Web Design Process template if you need the full project flow. Use the Website Design Client Onboarding Template before kickoff, the Usability Test Plan before research, and the Website Launch Checklist before go-live.