Faster decision making on website copy for quicker project delivery
How you can deliver websites faster and save time for you and your client, both.
The creators of every website have one prime goal that they wish to fulfill. It is to provide a great experience to its users. Websites go through numerous iterations and revisions until they are ready to be launched. There are more stages and people involved in the entire process than meets the eye. The perfect coordination of these stages is what determines the success factor of the entire project.
How a traditional website development workflow looks like
When a project or a business needs a new website or wants to update the existing one,
- The client provides a briefing to the designer by giving them their goals of redesign/ development.
2. The designer creates a template, which includes all the visual elements like color scheme, headers, placing graphic images etc.
3. The content guy provides the content to be filled into the webpages.
4. All the nerdy behind the scenes work happens where the developers create the UI from the template and fill in the content to the page using HTML, CSS etc.
Challenges faced with the traditional method while updating the website
Let us suppose the client wants certain things to be changed in the website. The designers are approached, the project manager provides some input, and the developers are informed about the changes to be worked upon.
Finally the client and other stakeholders view the reflected changes only to find out that it isn’t exactly what they had been looking for. This process could turn out to be extremely tedious and time consuming and poses a number of other challenges too.
1. The flow of the entire process is broken.
2. All the stakeholders of the project are not involved at every stage.
3. Multiple Iterations with different designs of the same webpage are made to get it right.
4. The changes can be reflected only after their implementation and hence early visualization of changes is very difficult.
And then came Visual Inspector
A popular chrome extension tool in the design community called Visual Inspector is a major breakthrough in the web-designing world which has proved to be designers’ rescue from digging in codes. It overcomes most of the challenges posed by the traditional methods of web development.
The Visual Inspector can be used to inspect or edit live web pages without having to do any coding. The best part is the collaboration feature with which a URL of the changed page is directly generated to be shared with anyone. You can also annotate and comment at the point where the change is made so that the rest of the team can view these comments and reply to them.
If you are a web designer and you haven’t checked out Visual Inspector I highly recommend it( You can checkout free version here.)
How a website development workflow looks like with Visual inspector
1. The designer shares the design with the developers and the rest of the stakeholders.
2. After getting the approval the designer builds that template.
3. The content writer updates the content into the website.
4. The developer picks up the pixel-perfect design details and content and proceeds to load it onto the website.
How does Visual Inspector resolve all of the earlier issues?
1. The flow of the process is simplified because of the collaborative effort to make and reflect changes.
2. All the stakeholders are involved at every stage since the changes are directly made on the live page and shared.
3. Early visualization is possible now that whatever changes are to be made are freely done without inhibitions as immediate feedback by the rest of the team is provided.
4. The developer is provided with a quick update to all the changes so that the developer can directly apply these changes to pixel perfection.
Summing up
What could have taken possibly months to accomplish can now be done in a week or so. The importance of collaboration is a great take away too. If everyone involved in the project are on the same page, success need not be chased. It can take care of itself. The apparent struggle with design changes is evidently reduced as can be observed and it is safe to say that Visual Inspector is a much faster way of making your website look like a million bucks.
If you are a product designer working on web based projects, Visual Inspector is must for you to make quick changes in live page or collaborate feedback — so download it now from Chrome webstore or checkout more on official website.
Also share it with your fellow designer friends. I’m sure they would appreciate you for it.
We would love to hear your thoughts on it as well as your experience with Visual Inspector and what else you’d like to see. Feel free to use the comment section for that.
If you find Visual Inspector helpful, share it with your friends.
See you in comments section.
Holidays are coming! Spread the good news with your friends on Twitter. Gift them this awesome tool. They are surely going to thank you for this.
