Understand the Web Development Process with your agency 

The web development process is more than designing and coding. A skilled web developer and designer can create appealing and innovative web pages while keeping client requirements and company objectives in mind through a considerable steps. This article will reveal the 7 stages of web development used by Synodus. 

7 Steps Of Web Development Process

1. Define your goals

The discovery stage dictates how the succeeding phases will appear. At this phase, an essential duty is to grasp your prospective website’s needs. It would help if you adequately decided the primary goals you want to achieve and the target audience you want to lure to your site. A website development questionnaire of this type aids in the formulation of the best strategy for future project management.  

For instance, a news portal looks different than an entertainment website, and online services for teenagers seem different than those for adults. Various websites offer users additional functionality, so you should employ other technologies for multiple objectives. A well-described and thorough strategy based on this pre-development data helps keep you from spending extra resources on unanticipated difficulties. These can come in forms like design changes or adding functionality that didn’t originally envisage.  

Define and describe the goals you want to achieve with the new website before you begin the website creation process. We urge that all key stakeholders sign off on these goals in writing, emphasizing that any future changes to the plans may affect the project scope, timing, and budget.  

The most common website objectives can be:  

• Increase stickiness and loyalty by encouraging repeat visits and transactions. 
• Make web administration easier by providing a user-friendly backend and an improved content management method. 
• Product education and interest-building are included in the launch or rebranding process. 
• Increase your SEO and organic visitors. 
• Increase the number of leads generated, on-site sales, and other sorts of conversions. 

2. Planning your sitemap and wireframe

The sitemap describes the underlying structure of a website. It’s a category list of web pages that outline your website navigation, essential landing pages, and how they relate to one another. With a sitemap, web developers and designers can identify the primary and subfolders, building a logical structure that helps Google index your site while making a smooth user journey. 

A wireframe is a graphic description of the user interface (UI) you want to design. However, it lacks detailed components such as colors, logos, font, etc. It only explains how and where the main pieces will be placed, for example, footer, header, image area, text area, and column.  

By preparing the sitemap and wireframe, you have an overlook of your future website. This way, you can see if there is optimization or editing needed to be done before moving to the next development step. No one want to redo the plan when it’s almost finish. Think about the resources, the effort and financial. This is a fundamental step of web development process, so don’t take it for granted.

3. Design your ideas

A UI/ UX designer builds the website layout to reflect the information structure, illustrate the material, and show essential functions. They may include images, logos, and illustrations in the layout, which provide an unpolished concept of the final product. Your team can then review the wireframe and layout to give comments.  

It is entirely up to you whether you want a basic or detailed image. A simple information layout is a visual representation of how something operates and connects. By looking at these designs, you can imagine the result will appear.  

The color palette and font of a website significantly influence how people feel. These details can elicit a wide range of emotions in individuals, making them a decisive element in design when applied unexpectedly. 

4. Prepare your content and assembly

While wireframes and designs are being developed, the material for the new site must be categorized and ready for loading. Ultimately, content reigns supreme. No amount of beautiful design will help you if you are unable to interact with your clients and readers. Depending on whether pages are consolidated, generated, modified, or removed, this can be lengthy.  

The primary goal of the content generation stage is to establish a communication channel via the user interface. Content writing entails presenting pertinent information about your organization understandably and appealingly. Throughout the web development lifecycle, calls-to-action, clever headlines, formatting, line editing, composing, and updating texts are all done.

It’s also critical to remember that any modifications to your site’s current content should be coordinated with an SEO resource. Doing so would guarantee that you are not inadvertently causing difficulties with rankings or traffic following the site launch.   

Instead of adding additional pages that you cannot manage and optimize regularly, you should focus your energy on producing superior pages. You may outsource this to numerous individuals, but no one understands your business as well as you do; therefore, you should write and organize the material yourself. The content can arguably be the worthiest of investing in a website. It is what makes or destroys your customer base. Your conversation rate will skyrocket if you have a solid aspirational identity or one-line. 

5. Write your website code

This phase is the most important part of the web development process. It’s when your web ideas become reality, thus it will take most time and effort. By following the phase closely with your team, your can ensure the final result’s quality and on-time delivery.

Learn how to assemble a good Web Development Team with 6 roles

Build the backend

This is the process of building website elements that no one can view, which implies that the back-end and front-end must communicate with one another for users to use the website’s functionalities. Such a process is something that happens all the time. Each corporation employs a back-end software developer who ensures that all business logic and data storage are interconnected. People who work on a computer system’s back end create databases and APIs. They link them to the computer.  

Back-end developers will define three elements while creating your website: 

• Your logic code, is a collection of rules for how your website will react to specific requests and how components on your website will interact. 
• Data processing is how your site will structure, manage, and retrieve information. 
• Your infrastructure is how the webpage will be hosted. Hosting your site offers you more control but is far more costly and forces you to monitor your system’s health and security. 

With all these elements and choices in place, your site will be poised for front-end development. 

Code the frontend

If you’ve ever dabbled in web layout design or experimented with a website in WordPress, Squarespace, or Google Sites, you’ve touched front-end web development. Front-end development is so-called because it makes the client-side software visible to users. The designs from the previous step are converted into HTML pages with animations and effects. JavaScript frameworks, in conjunction with libraries such as Angular, React, and many more, are used to make JavaScript more complicated than plain JavaScript can achieve. Since so many use mobile devices, the web app must be responsive and mobile-friendly.  

The web designer uses HTML, CSS, and a scripting language, typically JavaScript, to produce a user-friendly webpage. Some employ Bootstrap and Foundation for front-end development utilizing HTML and CSS. With various front-end frameworks on the market, you can choose what is best for your website. 

6. Testing

Before your website can go online, it must undergo extensive testing to ensure it will function properly. The quality assurance team examines the product’s functionality, usability, compatibility, performance, and other aspects. Before placing the website on a server, it is best to execute a series of rigorous, accurate, and repeatable tests to ensure that any problems have been identified and solved.  

Testing is an essential step in the web development process. Look for issues with the website’s quality assurance process and browser compatibility at this stage. Testers examine all of the features created and ensure that the written code is valid. In this phase, those who test and build software execute integration and regression, functional and performance tests, and many others.

Professional agencies rely on teams of quality assurance (QA) engineers to extensively test websites before they go live and to do the last rounds of testing after they go live. The QA process often includes all aspects of the website experience, such as speed testing, responsiveness, and other design features, functionality and integrations, and security. Following a review, the team will place the website on a server. This occasion ensues once the quality assurance team has approved it. 

7. Maintenance

The web development team’s role does not end with the website’s debut. To ensure that the website operates as smoothly as possible, you must manage and update it regularly. You must also keep track of the project’s progress and begin generating ideas based on site usage, which may lead to more development work on the project. This is the final step of the web development process.

Typically, your development team will perform a technical assessment to ensure the site operates soundly. The SEO team will go through a checklist to ensure that the migration plan is functioning well, the site is indexed correctly, and that no errors have been detected. The Analytics team will evaluate the data and tracking integrity on your new site, confirming that all goals are firing correctly, and the basic settings are in place.  

When a site is live, all teams must watch it for weeks, if not months. The new site must meet your users’ expectations. The site should be simply accessible by Google and precisely tracked and assessed for data-driven decision-making. 

7 Website Development Methodologies

A website development technique assists developers in breaking down a project into phases, with each stage laying the groundwork for the following stage’s operations. The following are some of the most prevalent web development methodologies: 

Agile: an umbrella name for a web development process that breaks the workflow into short cycles known as “sprints.” This system prioritizes urgent activities, with revisions made later in response to market developments. This necessitates less preparation, flexibility, and adaptability. To achieve high-quality project delivery, developers rely on an agile approach based on recommendations and user input. 

Scrum: Scrum shares the primary idea of Agile in that the emphasis is on team cooperation and breaking work into small sprints. Scrum focuses on client needs and strives to decrease waste while constantly measuring progress. 

Lean: This technique focuses on the most important features while removing anything that does not offer value to the customer. Lean development practices include short development cycles, early testing, and regular customer input. 

Kanban: Kanban splits work into divisions (planned, in progress, and developed) based on visualization to streamline web development workflow and keep team members informed. Team members monitor progress and update the board as appropriate. 

Waterfall: A linear method of software development in which the process is laid out in steps. Each stage contains a set of duties, and developers may only go on to the next stage after the previous one is finished. 

Iterative: Iterative focuses on metrics and data to adjust the website development process in response to changing market demands. It is based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, and analyzing. 

Extreme Programming: The recommended practices for this technique include continuous testing and planning, customer input, and more minor, progressive releases. 

Consider the following aspects while determining the optimal technique for your website project: Project size and scope, team experience, team placement, demand flexibility. 

A Concluded Web Development Checklist

Research and Discovery: This phase comprises research, analysis, technological investigation, thorough planning, and documentation. 

UX & Design: Most projects will start with the construction of wireframes. Development may comprise the global header and footer, landing pages, and basic internal pages. 

Beta testing: This is where you confirm that all your work is up to standard and, more importantly, where any issues are squashed. 

Following up: Maintenance and security check. 

Wrapping Up

The web development process can be pretty taxing, regardless of how little or large the project is. Knowing these stages allows you to maintain awareness of the whole web development workflow and gain control over the project.  

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