Working with PHP since 2011. Worked at a dev agency and occasional freelance projects. Mainly work with Laravel, Vue, plain JS, Bootstrap, Tailwind and UIkit. Rarely Wordpress. I know frontend tools, editing tools and prototyping tools but I still consider myself more of a web developer than a web designer.
With that being said,
1. Gather requirements, research similar projects and competitors. 2. Make mindmapfor big projects. Make sitemap for small websites. 3. Find templates (paid or free) or create a simple prototype. 4a. By this step
I got confirmation from client which template to use or
I know what kind of design client wants
So Imodify the prototype into proper design pages with or without a template
Linux Mint for OS. Valet-linuxplus for dev server env.PHPStorm foreditor. Firefox for browser. Joplin as a journal to save all research links, notes, snippets and also as a todo list which are turn into git commit and changelog in future.
My process is so simple due to the lake of time / budget
Find a good and beatif theme that first my client -> get most relevant information from client -> show the design to client to approve -> start edit and replace theme content with client info -> get the money