Guide For Clients: Stages Of Website Development

Keeping in mind that your website is the primary contact you use to get in touch with your customers, it is crucial to choose the right web design and a development team to do all the work and understand what it takes to create a good website. Learning more about this process will provide you with skills to better evaluate and calculate returns on your investment (ROI) and choose the right company to create a perfect website for your business.

1. Information Gathering

The first and the most important step of the website development process is information gathering where the client and agency discuss what is required. Some businesses have a clear vision of what they want, while others are not completely sure what they want at this stage. Some of the things that you should work through in this phase are name and branding, the purpose of the website, goals, target audience, and content. This information helps the company understand the client’s business goals and vision and deliver the website according to the client’s wishes.

2. Research and Planning

Using information collected at the first stage, the agency will start researching and planning to outline the ideas and concepts for your website. At this point, a site map is developed and it includes the following steps: User profiling where clients provide a brief about their target audience so the agency can create the online profile for them and define what kind of online behavior they can expect, what kind of design colors and content are likely to catch their attention. Architecture which includes website structure and how the users will access it. Page layout consists of defining the type of menu for the website, whether there should be sidebars, as well as the positioning of the text, media, forms, and other.

3. Design

After the first two stages, now it is time to develop the look and feel of the website. Depending on the target audience, the type of business/product a team of web designers will create a perfect layout that will strengthen the identity of the client’s company in the digital world. There will be one or more prototypes, and the clients will be able to provide suggestions, likes, and dislikes that will help web designers improve the site and polish it to perfection. In this phase, the communication between the client and the agency is crucial to ensure that the final layout will match the idea and taste of the business owner.

4. Development

All the prototypes that web designers have made will now be used to create a functional website. This is usually done on the internal server and your website will not go live until everything is finished. Depending on the client’s requirements, a team of web developers will decide whether they will be using a premade template, a framework, a standard CMS such as WordPress, or they will create a custom one for your business. Once the framework is set, they will start coding and make sure they comply with the web standards for HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. The clients will be able to see how the website looks and works during this phase and say if some things need to be changed before it goes live.

5. Testing

During this stage, the complete functionality of forms and other scripts of your website will be tested. This will make sure that your site looks perfect no matter which browser or device the visitor is using. They will also check if the code meets the current web development standards, transfer it, including deliverables like database and other assets to the client’s domain name and hosting. At this point, the necessary code to enable different analytics such as Google Analytics will be added. Unless the agency that creates a website has a maintenance clause, the control of the hosting, control panel, and others will be appointed to the client.

6. Maintenance

Many people think that after the website is designed, developed, and live there is nothing left to do. However, a website needs regular maintenance, and usually, the agency that created it provides this kind of support. If you want to be sure that the website you need for your business will be created by an experienced and professional team of web designers and developers, we suggest you contact the West Palm Beach Web Design Company today.