WEBSITE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

When you get an idea for your new project and bring it to the website development team members, you probably expect the work to begin right away. And it will, but most likely not exactly the way you imagine. For starters, the good team will not go directly into coding. They will ask you as many questions as they need for the web development process. In order to make the project look good and be convenient and useful, they will need to go through quite a lot of planning.

The information gathering is one of the most important parts of the web design development process. It helps the team understand your requirements more, your audience, and your goals. This is what will ensure the success of your website in future. Even if your idea is raw and incomplete, a good development team will be able to make it into a piece of cake. They might give you some ideas since they already have experience in the website development process.

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Since of the most important things are generally the time and money used for the project, you might want to discuss the scope and pricing with the team. If you have a limited budget, you should notify them, so that they would search for solutions within your budget. This will save you some nerves and time, and additionally will help during the communication. The website design and development process can be split into several phases. The main of those are information gathering, planning, design and content creation, the development itself, testing. After the release, you might also need a site maintenance.

Collecting Information Stage

Since information collection is the first and the most important part of the way, we’ll start with it. It is the most important part since everything that will be done during the actual development will be based on the information obtained at the beginning. You will rely on this data to built your project, and so will the development team. That’s why discussing the project and collecting the client’s requirements is so important. This way a team can get your vision of the future site. After the information is collected it needs to be processed and sorted. This will help to avoid any miscalculations or settle questions for any features. Perhaps, you have little time and want an MVP to be launched in the first place. Then, your team can help you filter the features depending on how critical they are for the launch. But, even if MVP is not the case and you want to build the whole thing at once, you will need to work on the plan with the developers, to make sure no features cross each other. Generally, gathering and processing information may take about 1-2 weeks.

Developing Scenarios For the Project

Once the information is in place, the planning can start. The team will start creating the user profile, thinking through the scenarios. The business planning is really important in this part of development. You will be asking yourself questions like “What will my customer want to see here?” or “How will the customers act?”. These kinds of questions can help to create scenarios for actions within the website. They also help to evaluate the risks since you can think of what can go wrong in the case. This stage involves algorithms planning and discussing. You can create a site roadmap for the customer. This way they will have an understanding of how their future website will look like. Another advantage is that you can see better the outline of the development plan. The sitemap, however, does not go into the customers’ actions details. It simply shows the structure of the project.

Creating Prototypes For a Showcase

Before the coding stage begins, it’s important to verify with the customer the way everything looks like. For this purpose, the team is developing interactive prototypes that are attached to the specification. Those can be mockups at early stages. The difference is that mockup only shows the actions within the website but does not have any colors, design, or logos. As soon as everything is arranged with the customer regarding the process, the design and content creating phase begins.

But, before that happens, the website design process flow needs to be discussed. This part is longer than information gathering. It can take a few weeks to arrange everything between the customer and the team. This happens since you might have different visions of the future view of the project. Nevertheless, the development team definitely has an experience and can predict customer behavior in many cases.

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The Development Process In Action

During the process, the development team comes up with the visual look of the website and the content that will be present on the site. This is the stage when the web designer is creating the design based on the results from the steps described above and handing it over to the developers. The layout becomes more clear, design elements like logos, watermarks, or anything else important for a project is added at this stage. The layout can be presented to the customer to collect a feedback. Once the design and content have been approved by the customer, the coding can begin.

The number of steps in developing a website can differ depending on the project. However, the design and content creation are always preceded by the information collection and the scope determination. This allows working easier on further solutions since the team will already be aware of the expected result. Yet, among the steps of developing a website, this one can be called a visual one. As this is the point when the customer is presented with some real graphics

Conclusion

All in all, the site development process will depend on the size and complexity of the project. Another thing that will matter during the building on the website is the purpose of use. For example, a website for teenagers will have algorithms completely different to a banking website. The usage of a website will directly influence the scenarios distinguished during the development. On the other hand, the purpose of the site will not influence the general flow and the steps included in the site development.

To achieve the best result, you should aim for working with a team of skilled professionals. The team should be able to understand and take into account your requirements. But, at the same time, they should be able to suggest you adjustments, if necessary. Here at Webcase, we have created a great team of experienced professionals. We enjoy what we do and try to create the best solutions for our customers. If you are interested in developing your website in Python, we are here for you!