What are the key stages in a professional website design workflow?

The key stages in a professional website design workflow are: Discovery (stakeholder alignment, audience research, brand audit, competitor analysis); Information Architecture (site mapping, content hierarchy, navigation structure, URL planning); Wireframing (low-fidelity layout of all unique page templates); Visual Design (applying brand system to wireframes, creating high-fidelity UI designs in Figma); Prototyping (building interactive flows for user testing); Client Review and Revision (structured feedback rounds with clear approval gates); Design System Documentation (component library, design tokens, annotation for developers); and Handoff (Figma developer mode, asset exports, responsive specification notes).

Each stage should have a defined output, a review process, and a sign-off before the next stage begins. Projects that allow stages to overlap without defined approval gates consistently experience scope creep and subjective revision cycles that erode timeline and budget.