You must be aware of the website development process in all sizes and shapes. The website development process always remains the same. Whether building a minor or a big website and updating the current one, your website should be user and SEO-friendly website. Your website development team should also stay ahead to fulfill the necessary deliverables and assets to build a new website.
What do you mean by the Website Development Process?
A website development process needs a documented and predictable set of steps to successfully complete a web development project or web application. This process helps align stakeholders, development resources, and team members to ensure the project delivery on time. The website development process may differ, and it depends on the web developer to developer. However, the general concept for creating the website remains the same for big and small web projects.
Below, we’ll outline the necessary steps for successful web development.
Step 1: Discovery
The first step of website development is discovery. It is a website development process life cycle, including the initial research, information gathering, and collaboration to confirm scope, stakeholders, feature requirements, processes, and expectations. This planning will let you know the initial project details and the first steps for web development. You should dig into each feature for more detail to confirm the scope of the discovery process. You can determine the additional requirements not listed in the initial proposal. The discovery meeting usually is one of the longer meetings in the complete project.
Step 2: Information Architecture
The information architecture is the hierarchy and structure of organizing the website’s information. It helps you to visualize the mapping, which will give you a sense of how and where the content and information will live on the website or web application. You must understand the website’s structure to determine what you need to build. Information architecture ensures a website structure for both users and search engines. It ultimately develops a roadmap to structure and make the website move forward.
Step 3: Wireframes
Once you have identified the page templates which need to be built, you move further onto wireframes. Wireframes are sketches of how a page template should be constructed. It utilizes white and black page elements to determine where page components will be placed. That’s how users can react to the layout of these elements and adjust as necessary. In this step, the information required on each page and structural design should be solidified. In this stage, the functionality of the specific page elements and responsiveness will begin.
Step 4: Web Design
The design in the web development process creates web-friendly designs for the website or application. It can be done using colors, styling, fonts, images, sizing, callouts, and layouts. The web design brings life to the new website and gives a better sense of what the live website will look like. The structures are built on top of the wireframes to retain the approved page layouts. The website design also considers mobile and SEO friendliness to ensure that the new website is laid out appropriately. It is for all users on all devices and is adequately structured for the web search engines.
Step 5: Content
Once you are done creating wireframes and designs, the content for the new website to be organized and ready to be uploaded. This can be a very time-consuming process. It depends on whether the pages are consolidated, created, edited, or removed. It is necessary to know that any changes to the current content on your website should be coordinated with an SEO resource. It ensures that you are not accidentally creating issues with the rankings and traffic once the site launch. The content also includes any new graphics, images, or design elements you want in the new website.
Step 6: Website Development
After the design completion, you can start with web development. In this stage, the website design team will hand over all creative assets to the web development team. Then the web development team will turn the website into a full fidelity and interactive version. The web development team will use various programming languages to translate the designs and functionality. Then it can be displayed to the users in the website browser. Moreover, these designs will be solved by the backend developers. They work on the content management system for the website managers and editors to manage web content moving forward.
Step 7: Testing and Quality Assurance
The development team will focus on quality assurance throughout the website development process and after completing the web development. In this step, the comprehensive QA auditing checklist is completed to ensure that the site meets and exceeds the standards of an efficient and fully functioning website. Quality assurance is necessary because it solidifies the users’ experience accessing your website. It also anticipates any challenges, such as bugs and incorrect device layouts.
Step 8: Website Launch
Once you have completed the above mentioned steps, you are finally ready for a website launch. Once QA has been completed, both teams are comfortable launching the website. The team will come up with the site launch strategy. The website launch strategy is the steps you will take to transition your current site to the new one. In case you do not already have a website, the transition is quite simple. The development team will push the website live and point it to your new domain.
Conclusion
The website development process may vary, but the principles remain the same. You should stick to a tried and true technique for web development. It will give you a sense of what is required in the short-term and long-term and keep the project moving forward. You should know and understand an ideal web development process. Then your team can better execute a web development project from start to finish.
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