Website Development Process – A Step By Step Guide

When it comes to developing a website from scratch, most businesses feel overwhelmed by the processes involved. If you are planning to develop a website then we have got you covered. In this article, we will have a look at the complete website development process in a step-by-step process. 

Having a good and responsive website is the most critical element of your business as it’s the face of you and what you offer to your customers. A good website will help you appear on the top Google searches when combined with advanced SEO practices. As there are so many frameworks, technologies, and CMS available, you need to do the right research to pick the right resources. WordPress is the most popular website building platform that empowers more than 28% of the entire web. It’s the most popular platform as it’s easier to use and scale the website in the future. 

Before you hire a developer and ask them to build a website for you, there is a website development process that you need to know. Even if you are planning to outsource the website development work, these below eight points will give you a better understanding. 

• Doing the Research
• Planning
• Choosing a CMS
• Designing
• Main Development
• Content Development
• Website Testing
• Overall Maintenance

Doing the Research 

The most important website development process is you need to do first is a comprehensive research on what you actually need for your business. There are two types of websites that you can build for your business — static and dynamic. A static website is a platform that has a fixed number of pages and information that never changes regardless of users’ interactions and inputs. On the other hand, there is a dynamic website that is more interactive, and there are several elements on the website that improves the overall user experience. 

Whether you need an enterprise website, a full-fledged E-Commerce website, or a personal branding website, you need to first decide. Once you decide, your developers can give you different examples of each type and it becomes easier for you to pick the right one. Also, you also need to decide the number of pages you want on your website. 

Planning

When it comes to planning, you need to think long-term and then plan the technologies, CMS, hosting, and other things accordingly. First, you need to decide which type of website you are planning to build — static or dynamic. Based on the option you pick, you need to choose the right technology stack that will define how well the website performs. You can pick WordPress CMS along with good cloud hosting to get a cutting-edge performance. On the other hand, you can go for a static website with shared hosting, that’s also enough if you only need a website for service or product demonstration. 

When you create action items based on your requirements, building a website becomes more cost-effective and faster. It is because your developers also have a clear vision about what you expect them to build. Once you plan all these important elements, it’s time to turn the idea into a reality by creating wireframes and initial design sketches. 

Choosing a CMS

If you need to launch your website faster with less cost, CMS is the best option that you can pick. WordPress is the most powerful CMS that you can use as it’s free and open source. The best part about WordPress is that it’s highly personalized and you can integrate several third-party services if you need. 

Another benefit of using WordPress is that you can choose from a variety of themes and performance plugins that help you stand out. However, you need to keep in mind that never download nulled themes or plugins as they might contain malicious scripts. These scripts slow down your website performance and the hosting provider can also terminate your hosting. 

Designing

While building a website from scratch, especially if you are not using a CMS, it’s important to first build wireframes to understand the flow better. You can ask your designers to create a couple of wireframes that show what the overall website and its usability flow will look like. You can compare different wireframes and pick the best layout that suits your business. The biggest benefit of building wireframes is that you have a design in mind that the final output will look like it. 

There are several tools like Figma that let you create quick wireframes for your website so that you can pick the right one easily. The website that you design professionally should look appealing so that you can get the maximum leads possible. Be it a number of pages, theme, font style, or the positioning of the elements, all these vital aspects become clear with wireframes. 

Main Development

Once the design is ready, it’s the main time to start developing the website and turn your idea and design flow into a reality. When it comes to website development, your developer will use the technology stack that you had suggested earlier. Developers will start creating custom code from scratch to build the website and ensure smooth functioning and interaction. It’s important that the front-end design should seamlessly work with the backend functionality. The developers will use the pre-made sitemap to create the respective pages and the needed elements. 

The team of developers will start building the website on a page-by-page basis and they will use a staging environment to deploy the website. It will not be the actual domain that you’ve purchased for your website. The biggest benefit of using a staging environment is that the underdevelopment site doesn’t get indexed by mistake and hamper the SEO.

Content Development

Content is the king and you can’t deny this while creating your website. Once your website is fully designed and developed, it’s time to build the content. The content has to be uniquely written and plagiarism free otherwise the site might get penalized by the search engines. Never copy content from other websites and then use it on your own new website. It will do more harm rather than offer you any benefit. 

Instead, it’s always better to hire good and professional content writers to get the content job done with perfection. The content writers will do research on keywords, trading topics and then start writing the content. There are several tools that are available for free that let you spin the content. But, you should NEVER use them as they will penalize your website and it will then become difficult for you to sort those aspects. So, for content development, always hire professional writers that can get the job done in a faster turnaround time. 

Website Testing 

Website testing is among the most important tasks that are as critical as designing and developing your website. It is because search engines pay a lot of focus on the overall usability of the website and the overall user experience. If the user experience is terrible and users are not able to access the site seamlessly on multiple devices, the bounce rate will increase. It will harm your website and its SEO practices. 

There are several types of testing that you can ask the tester to perform and ensure everything is fine. If the tester finds some bugs in the website’s functionality or code, you have to get it fixed from the developers as soon as possible. Some key aspects that need to be checked are website speed, mobile-friendliness, multiple screen tests, and more. The more tests you perform there will be fewer chances that your users will have a bad UX while browsing the website. 

Overall Maintenance 

Building a website is one thing, but maintaining the overall functionalities is a different thing. As search engine algorithms are also changing rapidly, it’s important that you keep up with the trend. In the maintenance, the developers will ensure all the functionalities are working seamlessly. There are several things that developers need to take care of on a website like broken links, website speed, UX performance, and so on. 

Regardless of whether you have a static website or a dynamic website, it’s important your team of developers keeps a constant check. It will help you gain an edge with SEO practices and make your website’s performance more intact. Along with them, you also need to ensure your website works seamlessly on both desktop and mobile versions. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, it’s important that your website should load within three seconds to offer good UX. Regardless if it’s a static website or a dynamic website, it should load seamlessly on mobile devices. 

Wrapping up

Keep this website development process in mind while developing a website from scratch. Whether you are planning to develop the website or hire a developer, it’s important that you follow these steps. It will help you develop the website with a faster turnaround time and with optimized cost. As we move towards digitization, it’s important to have a website and thrive online. Having a robust website can give you a competitive edge over competitors. Get started with building your website now and scale your business significantly.