If you have business or an idea for business and you're thinking of building a website, you landed on the right page.
In this guide, we'll outline the seven key phases of web development that will help you create amazing & highly- converting websites.
If properly carried out, a good website development process can help you create any type of website with successful user traffic, a positive user experience, and high retention.
What is the Web Development Life Cycle?
Let's quickly review the website development life cycle and its typical components before diving into the specifics of the steps involved in developing a website.
The software or website development life cycle is the methodology or a standard that guides you in the right direction to build a high-quality solution. It can be thought of as a list of the steps that need to be taken to finish the project.
Not only the developers, the entire team from the client-side, server-side, and the marketing side should have a basic idea of the web development cycle to achieve an exceptional website by adding valuable pieces of advice at the right time.
7 Phases of Web Development
Before discussing the phases, let's talk about the one important factor - Goal setting.
It is important to define the goal to the team members and to understand the client's goals before a project begins.
When you don’t set the goal, the team can easily get distracted from getting close to the desired end product. That’s why you need to be sure to know why the website is built before starting the web development process.
1. Research and Analysis
This is the first and most significant step in the web development process. This step includes all the research to be done before designing and creating content for the website. You’ll have to define following:
With accurate definitions and statistics, the team members will receive a clear picture and explanation of their work. The team is now aware of the needs and target audiences for the website.
2. Designing the Website
Designers will plan the web design with an interactive layout for customers once they have a good understanding of the website's requirements.
About 90% of website visitors bounce, according to Hubspot, because of poor design. It is also an essential and crucial phase in the creation of a website.
You will create a sitemap and a wireframe for the website based on the data gathered.
Sitemap is considered as the blueprint of the website, and it also tells the search engine which page is important in your website.
A UX developer creates the wireframe. It provides information on the key website sections, including the CTA, subscription box, etc.
You must thoroughly discuss every aspect of the website before beginning to code. Wireframe gives a clear picture of the website user interference.
In this process, we also include the logo, colour scheme, font used on the website.
Always keep the website's goal and target audience in mind when choosing such elements.
3. The Content Creation
Content is king, as we have heard.
Yes, many times the best content provides good revenue. When your content is catchy, it's easy to persuade your users.
When you’re building a website, you want to provide the best information about your service or product. If the content isn’t clear enough, the visitor will be left without the exact details needed.
So creating the content includes all the essential things to the website like:
Also, we need to keep SEO in mind, because content plays a major role in making your website SEO-friendly. So create SEO-optimised and interactive content.
4. Software Development
The coding phase is the fourth phase of the web design and development cycle. The foundation of the website is coding. The actual development of the website happens during this phase.
There are two segments in software development: Frontend development and Backend development.
Everything we see on the website was created by front end developers, as the name suggests.
Backend development completely empowers the working of the website. It will be used in updating the website from time to time.
5. Testing
It undergoes numerous testings for quality to ensure a better user experience.
In order to secure your website, testing is essential. If your website isn't properly tested, it will be prone to many vulnerabilities.
The quality analysing test includes:
To ensure that the website is free of all bugs, these tests should be done.
The performance of the website will be impacted by numerous errors if testing is unsuccessful.
We need to host and deploy the website once the testing is finished
A domain name and a cloud service like Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Products are required to purchase for hosting.
There are many different deployment tools available. Choose the deployment tool that best suits the needs of your website.
6. Marketing and SEO
So we built a website with a better user experience, speed and efficient design. But what happens if it doesn't appear on the web searchesl? It wouldn't be so good.
If you want to avoid this, optimize your site for search engines to let users find it easily.
Search engine marketing is based on keywords.
Make sure your website is optimized for SEO to bring you more visitors, since you need the traffic to generate revenue.
There are many tools available to search for keywords, like Google Keyword Planner, Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool.io, etc.
Additionally, there are tools to check whether a site is properly optimized. There are numerous tools available for tracking website traffic - Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Matomo Clicky, Fathom...
Here are some practical tips to make your website SEO friendly:
- Make the URLs simple.
- Make the website compatible with all devices.
- Optimise your images.
- Avoid keyword stuffing in content.
- Use internal linking.
- Optimise meta title and meta description with keywords.
- Integrate social media pages.
7. Maintenance
The website is published online once it has received the "green light" from the testing team and has been made SEO-friendly.
Therefore, after the release, you will be busy managing website maintenance. You will upgrade the website each time you upgrade your product.
Every trend requires the website to undergo some minor to significant changes. You will therefore require the best maintenance for the website in the long run after creating it.
Conclusion
The web development cycle has important stages at each phase. A different set of material and human resources are required for each step.
Analyze the needs and goals prior to beginning the web design and development research for better outcomes.
It is crucial to understand that there is more to web development than just coding and launching. The process of designing and developing a website is ongoing, and you can always make changes to the site to meet your needs.
For best results, follow the trend and make the necessary adjustments.