Regardless of the type of business you own, be it a website for an application or a corporate business site showcasing a company's online presence, website development stages will help you understand each step from planning to launch.
Make sure that your website doesn’t look outdated. Do a redesign now and then to keep a fresh look. It doesn’t have to be too often, just when you feel that it’s the time. It can help to increase user engagement and boost sales.
Here we will discuss website development stages to know how to hire the right vendor to create a high-performing website.
A high-performing, fast website may help generate organic user traffic, but it will also enhance the overall user experience of your potential clientele – thus resulting in increased retention.
Without any further ado, let's dive into the stages involved in website development.
Web Development Stages – The 5 Essential Steps
The essential steps involved in the development of a website:
- Planning
- Design
- Coding
- QA Testing
- Launch
The 5 stages, if implemented correctly, will result in the creation of a website that is both written with clean code and has a corresponding design. Apart from the design, your website should also contain the content that your visitors are looking for.
Moreover, every website requires a content management system, referred to as CMS, for easy management. It allows you to effectively manage your site and help you publish content for your web page. While there are many management systems, WordPress is often preferred by many startups and entrepreneurs.
"More than 30% of the websites you see on the internet are powered by WordPress."
Apart from WordPress, there are many more technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Angular, Laravel, Node JS that may be the core tools that define your website. While these might be used for different case scenarios powering your project or website, there's much more at play behind the scenes; these include gathering information, thorough planning, and site maintenance.
Here is a detailed insight into the web development life cycle and its 5 stages.
The Website Development Life Cycle
Before we dive into the steps individually, let's first explain what we mean by the web development life cycle.
"The process that leads towards creating a website is referred to as the lifecycle of website development, including Planning → Design and Development → Testing → Implementation → Maintenance."
A simple search on "website development stages" would lead you towards hundreds, if not thousands of articles. Each explaining the steps involved in their own unique way can be confusing.
To help ease your search, we've narrowed it down and created an all-in-one guideline for creating a successful website.
Website Development Stages – Requirements
The first and foremost object required before the creation of a website is - pre-project research and discovery. It is essentially an information-gathering stage. Without prior research and details of the project, we can’t start the planning phase.
It can also lead to the lack of goal or intent of the website/project, resulting in wasting more than needed resources and taking too much time to move forward.
It is an essential step required for developing a website. This includes research on your project intent, target audience, or potential customers and the content planned to be published in your blog.
Web Development Process – Purpose Of The Website
Website development process - building a new website or upgrading an existing one can get tricky without the right knowledge. It might lead to questions such as - What are the necessary steps involved in the process and how can you create a good performing web page?
A well-defined plan of your web project could save you time and money on the developing process hence why it is considered a necessity. You should clearly understand your project's purpose and have a clear overview of requirements for how it should work.
Before web development, start with asking yourself these questions:
- What's my project description?
- What's my target market?
- Which tech stack I prefer?
- Will I extend my development team with external developers?
- What's my expected budget for development?
- What's my preferred time frame?
- What is the main purpose of my website or application?
- Am I planning to integrate with third-party services or applications?
- Who will provide me with the content?
- Do I know my competition?
- (If it's an existing website or project) what can I share about it?
- What is my definition of success for this website or project?
Web Development Process – Target Audience
The target audience you want to attract to your website plays a vital role in choosing your project's right marketing and design strategy.
People of various ages react differently to different web designs. For instance, a young audience may be more prone to colorful and in your face design language, where the more mature target audience may get pushed back. Definitely consider this when choosing the design language for your web project or website.
Well-done research or discovery on the target audience will prevent you from spending excessive resources. These can either be re-adjusting or changing the design in the later phases of development or after launch.
Web Development Process – The Content Of The Website
Before the creation of a website, research on the type of content is mandatory. What type of content will be required for the target audience? Moreover, what kind of content will they be looking for?
The purpose, target audience, and website content require proper research before starting the web development process. Don’t forget about the questions you need to ask yourself before starting. Considering that each of these points may affect the design, structure, and functionality of your web project.
Apart from those requirements, two approaches are used for the web development process.
Website Development Management – Methodology For Your Project
To manage your web development process and to understand the development stages involved, there are two methodologies that you can make use of.
- Waterfall Methodology
- Iterative Methodology
Here's a brief insight into each methodology.
Waterfall Methodology
Waterfall is a software development methodology that focuses on dividing the entire process into different segments or parts. Each output serves as input for the next step.
The added advantage of using a waterfall methodology is that it allows better quality control and segmentation of each sub-process. Apart from better control, design flaws and errors can be identified early in the waterfall methodology. However, it lacks the ability to manage changing requirements.
Iterative Methodology
Iterative is a software development methodology that focuses on specifying and implementing a particular change in the software development process at a specific instance. These are reviewed later, subject to further requirements. It introduces flexibility that wasn't available with waterfall methodology. Iterative provides the ability to adapt to changing conditions and needs.
Both methodologies are great for their use cases.
Now that we have covered the grounds for the website development process let's head over to the 5 stages involved in web development.
Website Development Process – 5 Stages
There are always multiple ways to do something. One might be the right way, one might be the not so right, and one is wrong. As mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of blogs and articles on the website development process. However, it can get confusing.
Here we try to help medium-sized businesses to automate and digitalize their business processes by providing high-quality web development services.
The 1st Stage of Website Development – Planning
"Plans are nothing; planning is everything."
― Dwight D. Eisenhower, former U.S. President
Planning is an essential part of the web development process. If you're reading this, you understand how important it is to have clear project requirements for building web projects. Only with the results of research and discovery creates a good plan.
Because without prior analysis, it will be hard to create a consistent and long-lasting web presence. Analysis results in the foundation for creating a roadmap for web development.
Planning essentially involves choosing the approach for your project and having requirements at hand. This includes choosing the right vendor for executing the technological stack expertise, project management and design.
The 2nd Stage of Website Development – Design
"There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for."
– Milton Glaser, The first graphic designer who was awarded the National Medal of Arts
After covering the 1st stage - planning, you can continue towards choosing how your website looks and feels. As mentioned earlier, the target audience is the most crucial factor determining your website's look and feel.
In the 2nd stage, you will be working with a group of UI and UX designers. After all, they're the ones that will put an image to your thoughts. The wireframes are also utilized in the design. They're converted into buttons, menus, graphic designs, animations and other design elements.
For your website to increase visitor conversion, hire a skilled designer who can properly execute the design to establish the website's right look and feel. A proper design enhances the user experience, which will eventually result in higher conversion and retention rates.
The 3rd Stage Of Website Development – Coding
To code, a successful website that’s up and running, works fast and matches google technical SEO requirements, you have to hire a skilled developer. Developers have different technological expertise, including HTML, CSS, Angular, .NET, Node JS, JavaScript and many programming languages and tools. Find one that matches your technology stack expectations. If the technological stack is confusing to you - contact us for consultation.
Coding is where your idea, previous planning and analysis turn into a working website, with clickable buttons, multiple pages, payment system, online chat, chatbot, shopping cart, coupon codes and many more features that make it your place to generate leads interact with clients promote your products or services, with CRM integration receive and store client information, automate your online business and the list goes on.
The 4th Stage of Website Development – QA Testing
QA (Quality Assurance) testing enables you to reduce the number of bugs on your website. A series of tests performed by a QA engineer identifies web or software bugs that could exist due to complex functionality in your project.
The QA team runs test cases or testing protocols to hunt software bugs to prevent errors. QA testing assures that your website works perfectly on all browsers and all devices, be it a mobile device, desktop, or tablet.
Quality Assurance Testing improves:
- Functionality
- Performance
- Usability
- Compatibility
QA testing can be on an ongoing basis (recommended) or permed occasionally. Once bugs are fixed, your website is ready to get deployed.
The 5th Stage of Website Development – Launch
It’s a happy and stressful moment at the same time, now be ready to apply online marketing, PR and SEO to reach your clients and serve them your products and services. Once your website is live, it needs periodic maintenance to ensure everything is working fine and that there aren't any issues.