Unfortunately, that's something that doesn't happen every time. All you get, instead of the business card is the text. Simply no character or other thing to draw idea about the company you would be designing a website for! Where do you go now ?
To solve this dilemma, make a plan, and contact the person you would be designing for. Try to get some critical inputs from him, such as, the kind of work his company does, the content of the site on which you have to work and many more if possible. With all these information, you certainly will be able to come up with a successful layout and design.
Anyone who has a little experience and a working knowledge of some basic layout principles, no matter what level of creative talent he or she has, can come up with a design that works well and looks good. So now we can start with the basics and before long you'll have the groundwork needed to design a quality web site.
The Design Process So how do you start ? There are lots of steps which are required for creating a design but real process of developing an entire site or web application includes two major tasks: discovery and implementation.
Discovery In this, you discover as many information about your client as you can. For this you meet the client and try to gather information and your queries could be any of these:
how they run their business,
who are the targeted audience,
do they have any logo,
which competitors' site they like the most, why do you want to develop a web site, what kind of information you want to provide in your site and many more. Once you have all these information then only you'll be able to come up with an appropriate and effective design.
Implementation In this part you just implement those information which you have gathered from the client to create a design.
If you will work along these ethics with some conventions that are related with design, it can prove of immense help to further strengthen your design process. Then you would start understanding the nuances of why an ugly design is never beautiful! No doubt some people have a bit of capability for it, but anyone can learn.
