Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
Planning to become an entrepreneur to start your own digital business? Confused about whether to build a website or not?
As per a report by Top Design Firms, most small business websites, precisely 71% have websites to establish an online presence.
Developing a well-planned website is the need of the hour for any digital startup. It is not only about the coding but also about what else goes behind designing and developing each aspect. Website development involves several stages that collectively make your project successful. Right from market research to maintenance and everything in between.
While the most crucial step is planning the website development as it presents the face of your business to your target audience. It helps your website visitors get what they are looking for while they are researching.
A professional team of web designers knows that it’s vital to have a streamlined step-by-step possess for successful project management, whether it offers Node.js or Reactjs development services. It’s also a fact that proper planning is what would help build a better website for your digital business. Let’s get to know why:
Proper website development planning and management help you identify and reduce potential risks that are lurking behind at the macro or micro level. It also ensures that such critical threats are mitigated and help you achieve the larger goals of your business.
Another reason why proper planning is essential is it helps minimize design and development mistakes. Planning is a stage where you lay out the proper foundation, the scope of work, timeline, project costs, and every minute detail to iron out possible failures.
Through proper planning, you set the course for what’s to come by identifying any assumptions and setting expectations from your website design and development team. An expert design team ensures your website development project doesn’t fall through the cracks and miss any deadlines or deliverables.
Now that we have understood the importance of proper planning and why it’s necessary, let’s get to the main part of this article:
Market research and goal setting are the first baby steps for any business venturing into the digital space. Without setting proper goals with extensive research, it’s difficult to process and complete a web design and development project.
Thorough research will help you determine the following information to proceed further in your website development project:
Business niche or industry
Target addressable market and their preferences
The ultimate goal of developing a website
Write down the specific goals that help you take actionable and tangible steps. Doing so also makes you aware of your web design and development requirements to begin your market research. Researching your target market is crucial to understanding the intricacies of your client’s business and industry.
Further, proper market research enables you to decide what features and functionality to include in your website. You’ll also get to know the current market trends and what draws users to your website.
The planning stage involves outlining a step-by-step process of gathering information for website design and development. For those new to this, understanding how to create a website from scratch is fundamental before delving into detailed planning. Just like any other project whether personal or professional, the process always begins by preparing the plan and outlining the process.
It may be tempting to skip this step to start preparing design wireframes and writing codes directly. However, proper planning backed by sufficient research will help guide your web design team to achieve the desired results.
And as the saying goes “measure twice and cut once”, spending the appropriate amount of time will save you unnecessary delays and avert risks. You also want to plan for what will happen after the design, development, launch, and maintenance stages. Moreover, plan and create an SEO strategy for developing a user-friendly website.
Wireframes are web page elements such as widgets, header, navigation, and others to move your website to a mockup stage. While it’s a challenge to balance creative designs with logical functions, your team needs to utilize the information gathered in the first stage to give your website a shape.
Another problem with website design is that content receives far less attention and even its importance gets lost in the design transition. Your website design should always accommodate content first and not the other way around.
The content should complement your website design and encourage visitors to take action. It should clarify the goals and actions users need to take when visiting your website for the first time. Also, pay attention to colors, typography, and graphics to create an appealing and eye-catchy website.
The development stage is where all your design mockups and functionalities take the shape and bring your website to life. However, it’s the most complex and lengthy stage, which requires an expert team of coders and programmers.
The first and crucial step is to determine and select the required tech stack that is in accordance with the functionality and design needs. Once that’s taken care of, commence the development stage with the Homepage and then the rest of the vital pages as referred to in the sitemap.
Development is a technology-heavy stage, which requires deep understanding to manage several complexities. There will be thousands of lines of codes that need to be checked and rechecked for minor to major errors to ensure your website is bug-free.
Further, your development team needs to take care of necessary tools and plugin integration to make sure the website works as intended. Also, prepare plans for the launch, maintenance, and feature addition in the future.
Once the website is developed and ready for the world to see and experience how great it is, prepare a launch plan. But before launching your website, it’s important to test out that every aspect, button, and page works as expected.
Let your web design team conduct unit tests and several other kinds of tests to make sure users get a satisfactory experience. Testing everything out is one of the crucial steps that determine the success of your website development project.
Apart from testing codes, you want to check all the content is placed appropriately and doesn’t have grammar or spelling mistakes. While it may seem a little, it can significantly impact your website experience and turn users off. So, go over your website and check every aspect multiple times to be confident that everything is in order to launch your website.
No matter how well-developed your website is, if it is not maintained properly, your user experience will decay over time. Also, you need to adopt new technology as and when they arrive to stay updated with the latest trends on the internet.
For starters, prepare a checklist with elements that need to be maintained, design that needs to be upgraded, and errors to be mitigated. If your website is not maintained well and updated frequently, it’ll harm your brand’s reputation and cause them to look someplace else.
Also, you want to frequently update the website content to reflect the latest and most accurate information about your products, pricing, and customer reviews. Outdated and inaccurate information will frustrate your customers and they may not get in touch with you again. Thus, maintaining your website is key to your success.
So, these were the six essential stages for website design and development to complete your online shop project successfully. With proper research and planning, your website will become smooth, accurate, and to the point.
Make sure you don’t skip these essential steps from market research to the maintenance of your website. With acute care and execution, your website development project will suffice your customers and lead your brand to the desired success.
Workast