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
- define database structure
- research necessary laravel packages, npm packages, third-party services (mailing, payment, notietc)
- git repo
- test server
- Show client weekly or bi-weekly
- Test and revise
- Repeat
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.