Helpful.Articles
5 Steps to a Website!
There are numerous steps in the web site design and development process. From gathering initial information, to the creation of your web site, and finally to maintenance to keep your web site up to date and current. The following list is a brief outline of the web development process.
- Information Gathering
- Planning & Design
- Development
- Testing and Delivery
- Maintenance
1. Information Gathering
The first step in designing a successful web site is to gather information. Many things need to be taken into consideration when the look and feel of your site is created.
This first step is actually the most important one, as it involves a solid understanding of the company it is created for. It involves a good understanding of you - what your business goals and dreams are, and how the web can be utilized to help you achieve those goals.
Certain things to consider are:
- Purpose
What is the purpose of the site? Do you want to provide information, promote a service, sell a product, etc?
- Goals
What do you hope to accomplish by building this web site? Two of the more common goals are either to make money or share information.
- Target Audience
Is there a specific group of people that will help you reach your goals? It is helpful to picture the “ideal” person you want to visit your web site. Consider their age, sex or interests - this will later help determine the best design style for your site.
- Content
What kind of information will the target audience be looking for on your site? Are they looking for specific information, a particular product or service, online ordering…?
2. Planning the Design
Using the information gathered from phase one, it is time to put together a plan for your web site. This is the point where a site index is developed.
The site index is a list of all main topic areas of the site, as well as sub-topics, if applicable. This serves as a guide as to what content will be on the site, and is essential to developing a consistent, easy to understand navigational system. The end-user of the web site - aka your customer - must be kept in mind when designing your site. These are, after all, the people who will be learning about your service or buying your product. A good user interface creates an easy to navigate web site, and is the basis for this.
During the planning phase, we will also help you decide what technologies should be implemented. Elements such as interactive forms, ecommerce, flash, etc. are discussed when planning your web site.
Drawing from the information gathered up to this point, it’s time to determine the look and feel of your site.
Target audience is one of the key factors taken into consideration. A site aimed at teenagers, for example, will look much different than one meant for a financial institution. As part of the design phase, it is also important to incorporate elements such as the company logo or colors to help strengthen the identity of your company on the web site.
In order to keep our prices affordable, AdvBT uses templates to help decide on the design for your web site. These premade designs are just the start of your website. Once we begin development, we take one of these designs and customize them to suit your needs. Keep in mind, this is not the typical low end designs that you can only change the text. We completely redesign the site base on your color scheme, images, logos, and content.
3. Development
In this phase, communication between us is crucial to ensure that the final web site will match your needs and taste. It is important that you work closely with us, exchanging ideas, until you arrive at the final design for your web site. We will allow you to view your project throughout the development stage. The most important reason for this is that it gives you the opportunity to express your likes and dislikes on the site design.
This is typically done by first developing a “template” for the pages and subsequently the home page. The template contains the main navigational structure for the web site. Once it has been created and approved, we will take your content and distribute it throughout the site, in the appropriate areas.
Elements such as interactive contact forms, flash animations or ecommerce shopping carts are implemented and made functional during this phase, as well.
4. Testing
At this point, we will attend to the final details and test your web site. We will test things such as the complete functionality of forms or other scripts, as well last testing for last minute compatibility issues (viewing differences between different web browsers), ensuring that your web site is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions.
On the technical front, a successful web site requires an understanding of front-end web development. This involves writing valid XHTML / CSS code that complies to current web standards, maximizing functionality, as well as accessibility for as large an audience as possible. A good web designer is one who is well versed in current standards for web site design and development. The basic technologies currently used are XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). As part of testing, your designer should check to be sure that all of the code written for your web site validates. Valid code means that your site meets the current web development standards - this is helpful when checking for issues such as cross-browser compatibility as mentioned above.
Once you have given the final approval, it is time to deliver the site. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program is used to upload the web site files to your server. AdvBT offers domain name registration and web hosting services as well. Once these accounts have been setup, and your web site uploaded to the server, the site should be put through one last run-through. This is just precautionary, to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site continues to be fully functional.
This marks the official launch of your site, as it is now viewable to the public.
5. Maintenance
The development of your web site is not necessarily over, though. One way to bring repeat visitors to your site is to offer new content or products on a regular basis. AdvBT will be more than happy to continue working together with you, to update the information on your web site.
If you prefer to be more hands on, and update your own content, our hosting plan offers an online editor (looks similar to MS. Word). This is provided free of charge and standard with every hosting plan.
It’s really up to you as far as how comfortable you feel as far as updating your own web site. Some people prefer to have all the control so that they can make updates to their own web site the minute they decide to do so. Others prefer to hand off the web site entirely, as they have enough tasks on-hand that are more important for them to handle directly.
That’s where our help comes in, once again, we can take over the web site maintenance for you - one less thing for you to do is always a good thing in these busy times!
Other maintenance type items include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SES (Search Engine Submission). This is the optimization of you web site with elements such as title, description and keyword tags which help your web site achieve higher rankings in the search engines. The previously mentioned code validation is something that plays a vital role in SEO, as well.
There are a lot of details involved in optimizing and submitting your web site to the search engines - too much to provide here. This is a very important step, because even though you now have a web site, you need to make sure that people can find it!
