THE BEST PORTLAND WEB DESIGN

There is a lot that goes into design other than just making things look pretty. Information Architecture, User Interface, and User Experience are the pillars of web design.

Information Architecture (IA) determines how your site’s content is labeled and organized so as to be easily understood and accessed by the user. If done right, IA should be seamless and unnoticed by the user. We do a good job on this I promise, please don’t go looking for problems with our IA.

While Information Architecture is an underlying organizational system, User Interface (UI) is a top level visual system. UI is the visual representation of the IA system. The design of the UI is intended to make locating content or features of the site easy and intuitive for the user and at the same time be aesthetically pleasing.

Finally we have User Experience (UX), this is a culmination of the previous types of design and it is directly related to how a user feels interacting with your site. How they feel using your site will then be associated with how they feel towards your company as a whole, which makes getting this right something really worth spending some good time on.

Here's how we put it all together. The IA is determined through the building of what's called a Site Map. This is a simple layout of which pages will make up the site and what content will be put on to those pages. UI is implemented with Wireframing. This now zooms in to specific pages and how the content will be arranged on those pages. Then UX is added by taking the Wireframe, which provides vague content positioning, and finalizing it in a Mockup. A Mockup will consist of final coloring, fonts, text content and site assets (photos, videos, graphics, etc).