Build Your Presence Online: Process of Website Development Made Simple

No successful online business can exist without a website. Online presence improves your personal or professional branding. It’s a good way to distribute your content organically. 

According to recent research approx. 63% of the world’s population use the Internet nowadays, which is more than five billion people.  The Internet offers a wide variety of activities. 

There are 197,046,670 active websites today and 175 new websites are created every minute. To prevail in the commercial market, it is important to know how users spend their time online, their preferences, and their expectations. 

What is Website Development?

The term “web development” is associated with a wide range of activities and with a lot of experts involved to create a website from idea to a final product. The website development process is not limited to coding as many may think. To get a well-structured and visually appealing website more operations are needed. 

Definition: Web development is a complex process of developing a website for WWW. Its purpose is to effectively create any type of website. The web development team usually consists of a Project Manager, a Web Designer, Front-end developers, Back-end developers, a Tester, and an SEO specialist, but is not limited to. 

What Are Web Development Types?

There can be distinguished three types of web development: static, CMS/dynamic, and e-Commerce. 

If you observe a few pages with no data changing – that is a static website. Though they are simple to design, static websites have to be updated manually. And that’s time-consuming. Another disadvantage is that they lack high functionality and have issues with integrating complex features. Technologies used: HTML, CSS, and Java. 

Building a dynamic website is not an easy task. The leading CMS (Content Management Systems) are WordPress and Joomla. CMSs offer necessary flexibility in terms of design, development, and further updating, and are useful for all types of websites. Note, that CMS is not the same as a site builder (like Wix, etc).

An e-Commerce website (or other words e-shop) is referred to transactions conducted by the means of the Internet and requires a platform or tool to build your online shop, otherwise, you develop from scratch. Possible solutions: Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, etc.

The Website Development Process in 7 Steps

The web development process includes a wide variety of tasks and could be overwhelming, so we’ve made a 7-step guide on how to develop your own website.

Before you can start, secure your future domain name and web hosting account. Mind, that you don’t keep them forever and have to update ownership regularly.

 Information Preparation

Define your business goals and audience. You should have a strong vision of your website’s purpose like brand awareness, audience educating, building trust and loyalty, information sharing, or money-making. 

Start with collecting info from the customers. Then do some thorough analysis of the collected data to get your content priorities right and craft your messages according to your users’ needs. 

As a result of this stage, you’ll get a draft schedule of your project. 

 Planning

Planning sessions require a lot of ideas exchange and brainstorming. Based on your collected data, you are ready to develop a sitemap and a wireframe for your website. 

A sitemap shows all site pages and their connections from a bird’s-eye view. It is a very useful file that lists pages to be indexed by search engines. The file itself must contain a certain syntax, as well as describe all the necessary and important pages of the site.

A wireframe is a skeleton of your website and illustrates its functions and content based on user needs and user journeys. It’s preferable to make two versions – for mobile and desktop platforms. 

 Custom Website Design

This is considered to be the most creative part of work. Try not to lose a track of your business goals. Your website design should represent your project as a whole. Use improvement opportunities to meet users’ expectations.

60% of consumers stated that usability is an important design characteristic for an online shop when judging business credibility.  

As estimated by respondents, photos (40%), color (39%), and videos (21%) are the most valued visual elements of the website design.

Responsive websites (users would like to reach out to your website from multiple devices) result in better sales for 63% of companies. 

At this point, you get a feel of how the final website will look as you receive a clickable layout with all buttons, CTAs, color schemes, graphics, animation, menu, and many more. 

Tools used at this step: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Sketch.

 Professional Content Writing

Grabbing users’ attention would require you to prepare eye-catching and convincing content. Attention should be paid to headings, subheadings, tags, and other website text elements.

Visitors need only 2,66 seconds to focus on a key section of a website. Therefore, it’s important to create quality content across the customers’ entire course of interaction with your site to pursue your marketing goals. According to CMI research, 2020, nearly 50% of B2B organizations outsource at least some of their content marketing activities.

Basically, all content managing tools can be divided into four main groups and can provide the best solution for specific areas for improvement: 

• Planning (HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator, Google Trends, Trello, Evernote, MindNode, etc).
• Drafting (Google Docs, Canva, TitleCase, Sharethrough Headline Analyzer, etc).
• Editing (Grammarly, Thesaurus.com, etc).
• Productivity (TomatoTimer, RescueTime, Todoist, Pocket, etc).

Certainly, you don’t have to use all of them. 

It’s a common practice to prepare all website content prior to starting the development stage. 

 Programming

Front-end development deals with the user side of the website – what visitors see. All aesthetic elements of the website interface (layouts, navigation, etc) are in charge of the front-end devs. JavaScript frameworks and libraries like Angular, React, and many more are used depending on the complexity of projects. 

The back-end development part is usually behind the scenes for the end users: servers, operating systems, APIs, databases, security and content code management, and web architecture. Commonly used tools: Microsoft .NET and Node.js.

The back-end and the front-end developers collaborate tightly. You can learn more about how to choose the right technology stack for your project here. 

 Testing and Deployment

At this step, developers will test the functionality of all the elements on the website and upload it to the server. Usually, there are always a few discrepancies like broken links that should be fixed before the project is finished. The necessary tests also consider the website’s speed, multiple-browser tests, and device compatibility. 

Now the website is ready for launch to the server! 

Post-launch Maintenance 

Always be prepared to make adjustments in the future and keep the website updated:

• Revise your content on a regular basis as SEO strategies are constantly changing. 
• To bring more visitors, start promoting your website. 
• Regular performance analysis will help to advance marketing strategies. Use additional tools like Google Analytics. 

Conclusions

Regardless of the project size, all phases of the website development process are considered equally important. It’s more than just coding to create a website. Understanding business needs and requirements at the very start is crucial and would make your path to an appealing and high-performance website smooth.

Talentica is a top staffing service provider that can match you with verified professionals that will ensure the timely delivery of full-circle web development projects according to your requirements. Check out our services.

Faq

• How many steps are in the website development process?

  Usually, the website development process varies from five to eight stages. However, on average the following seven steps describe the whole picture: 1) information gathering, 2) planning, 3) design, 4) content writing, 5) development, 6) testing and deployment, and 7) post-launch maintenance. You are free to modify the process according to your project needs.

• How do I hire a web development team?

  Look for a web development agency that provides more than only development services. Choose a team that will manage, support, and upgrade your website after deployment. Ask the agency for customer reviews and to present their case studies so you can have a clear picture of them. Consider the costs: both upfront and long-term benefits when hiring a web development team.