Web Design and Development: What does it take To Deliver a Working Website?

In the current digital world, businesses are operating online through websites. It is from here that customers can reach them from anywhere in the world and buy from them. Unlike in their brick and mortar locations, the customer base is bigger online, marketing is easy, and the cost of doing business is generally reduced.

When you decide to join the e-commerce industry, the main investment that you have to make is on a business website. This is not something that is ready-made, and so you need a good web design company to set up one for you. Since there are millions of business websites on the internet, your website needs to have the features that will make it stand out and stay on top of the competition.

The questions that will linger in your mind when it comes to building a website are the cost and time. Well, that is a question that your web designer or developer can answer because it depends on the scope and size of your project. However, knowing what happens behind the scenes will give you a hint of what goes on from the start to the finish of your project and what to expect.

Web design and development is a process that is done in stages as follows:

1. Research

The first step in web design and development process is information gathering. Since there are different types of websites, it is important to know the purpose, the goals and the target audience of the site. This is to ensure that your site provides functionality to the users.

2. Planning

Planning involves the creation of a sitemap that will give a picture of how the site will generally look like. The data that is used here is based on the information obtained from the research stage. The sitemap will show the inner structure of the website and the relationship between different areas such that you can determine its ease of navigation and user-friendliness.

3. Web design, content writing, and assembly

This is the step of creating a website layout that contains visual content like images, logos, colors and videos among others. This can be done in the form of a graphic sketch or a real graphic design. As a customer, you should be able to review it and ask for adjustments wherever it is needed. Content writing involves the creation of texts like headlines, call-to-action and anything information that you will want to communicate to the users.

4. Coding

Coding is the actual creation of a website because the initial stages were mainly for preparation.

Coding is a work of web developers who have a hands-on coding experience and competent in various programming languages. Here, the code has to be valid from the creation of the homepage to all the sub-pages and web developers ensure code quality through unit testing to avoid future bugs as shown by this unit testing tutorial.

5. Testing

Testing is usually done to ensure the quality of the website. Testing starts with the code through unit testing before other tests like functionality, usability, compatibility, interface, performance and security testing are done. Testing is followed by review and then launching the website.

6. Maintenance

You cannot part ways with your web design company after the launch because your site needs to be maintained regarding making updates, fixing problems and so on.

Web design and development is a process that requires different skill sets that are necessary to piece together and deliver a good business website. Each stage takes a minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 6 weeks to be complete, and now you understand why you need to be patient about it.

Published by Kidal Delonix (1200 Posts)

Kidal Delonix is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.