Today constructing a website is not a big deal. Every person with little technical knowledge can design a website. However, developing a website and developing a powerful website are different. Just coding and designing is not everything. You need some CSS, HTML, and JavaScript for designing the website. But there are also some other things you need while creating a website. There are different website design and development phases. Every website requires good planning and steps to achieve good results.
Phases of Website Design and Development
1. Information gathering
This is the most important phase of the website. Your whole site depends on the information. You can only create a powerful site if you have gathered all the information correctly. Before starting any design, get to know what your website requires. What is the main purpose of your website?
Is it an eCommerce site or blogging?
What are the main goals of your website?
Do you need a website to earn money or share information?
Who is the potential audience?
Find the main purpose of the website. Say you have a store and now you want to create an eCommerce platform for it. For this, you have to gather all the information about the business and the products. Just creating an eCommerce site and adding products won’t help. Get information about the products and your business. Now check on your audience. Offline stores have a local scope. But your online store can get you customers from across the country or even the world. For a good website, gather all information about your business. You are the only person who knows the business well. Try to point out all details before planning or creating the website.
2. Planning
Once you gather all the information for the website; start planning. Your plan will be the blueprint for web design and development. Now the budget for your website. You need some budget for a website even if you design and develop the website yourself. For a blogging site, the designs and themes are simple. The development phase is also easy. But if you need an eCommerce site, you need a good plan. Your plan should have all topics and subtopics of your website. From the content, color, themes, templates, you need everything. Always document all your information gathering. People often gather lots of information but forget the crucial one while planning. If you have all the data in documents, you can easily check and make your plan. If you have a team then talk to everyone and get some good ideas. Talk to your designer, developer, and digital marketing team. As you know, only creating a site for a business won’t help a lot. You need good online marketing for your business. Talk to the marketing teams and plan the website strategies. Your site’s color and theme should be according to the business and audience. Once you plan everything about the website then only you move to the next phase.
3. Website design
Now you know what are the strategies and requirements of your website. Check your plan and start designing the site. Your website design must be attractive. Don’t think like a pro, consider yourself as a customer. Now start designing a site that looks user-friendly and attractive. Team up a senior designer with a newbie. Your senior designer knows what the site requires and a newbie can bring fresh ideas. In this phase, you have to design the website and add the content. Don’t do both things at once. You can create a design and then write the content according to it. Or, you can write all the content for the site and then start designing. While designing, also think about SEO. Write and design an SEO-friendly website. From logo design to selecting templates, everything must be perfect. Think that your design is everything. Customers only check the products on information if the site looks attractive. Design an attention-seeker website for your business.
4. Development
After designing the site, now move to the website development phase. Now it’s time to do some technical work. The developer will start programming the site and implementing all the necessary functions. For blogging or informative sites, you need less time and effort. But if you need an eCommerce site then the development phase may take lots of time. Also, have the test runs while developing the website. Integrate all the data on the initial phase and then create the database, logic, and programs. Your whole site depends on the web development phase. Create a robust website to assure that your site will work easily. Also, create a mobile-friendly website as most people use smartphones to browse anything on the internet. A more user-friendly site means better web traffic.
5. Website Testing and Delivery
After the development phase, your site is ready. Now it’s time to test your website. The testing phase of the website is done by the QA team. Your QA team will be responsible for creating test cases. The test cases for the website must include functional testing, design testing, and content testing. The QA team will run several tests on the sites. Your website must pass all the test cases. If any function fails, your development team will immediately fix it and again send the site to the QA team. The QA team will run the test until the site passes all the test cases. Once the site is fully tested, all the files will be updated to the server and then the site will launch officially. Now your website is on the internet and everyone can view it publicly.
6. Maintenance
This is the last phase of website design and development. After launching the site, it needs good maintenance. The maintenance is done for a certain time like for a few weeks or months. Many times the site shows glitches after launching or in real-time. Whenever any error appears, the maintenance team immediately fixes it before it causes any effect on the web traffic. This team is also responsible for providing regular updates on the website.
While designing and developing the site, check for SEO. Create an SEO-friendly site like good CMS, content, canonical URLs, speed, etc. With good design and online marketing on-site, you can get good traffic and brand recognition.
