BENEFITS OF WEBSITE

• Online Presence : A business with a website can establish an online presence, enabling them to reach a wider audience and expand their customer base.
• 24/7 Accessibility : A website is accessible 24/7, unlike physical stores with limited operating hours. This enables customers to visit and interact with your business at their convenience.
• Credibility & Professionalism : A well-designed and informative website enhances credibility, instilling trust in potential customers and showcasing professionalism.
• Brand Visibility : With a website, it is easier to increase a brand’s visibility by showcasing your products, services, and unique selling propositions to a global audience.
• Marketing & Advertising : A website serves as a powerful marketing tool, allowing businesses to promote their offerings, run online advertising campaigns, and attract targeted customers.
• Customer Engagement : Websites provide a platform for customers to engage with your business, ask questions, leave reviews, and provide feedback, fostering stronger customer relationships.
• E-commerce Capabilities : A website with e-commerce capabilities enables easy online transactions, expanding customer reach and increasing sales potential enabling businesses to directly deal with customers.
• Data Collection & Analysis : Websites allow businesses to collect valuable customer data, enabling you to analyze user behavior, preferences, and trends to make informed business decisions.
• Competitive Edge : With a website, a business can get a competitive edge over rivals already with online presence in the market is essential for maintaining a competitive edge.
• Scalability & Growth : A website provides the flexibility to scale a business, add new features, and adapt to changing market demands, supporting long-term growth and success.

TYPES OF WEBSITES

There are many different types of websites, including: 

• Business websites: Share what a business offers, customer testimonials, and awards 
• E-commerce websites: Online shops that sell products to customers 
• Blogs: Regularly updated with articles on a specific topic 
• Personal websites: Used to post and share thoughts 
• Nonprofit websites: Allow users to donate and learn more about an organization 
• Community forums: Allow users to have discussions using posted messages 
• Web portals: Compile data from various sources and present it in one unified interface 
• Brochure websites: Mimic the look and feel of a traditional brochure 
• Entertainment websites: Contain consistently refreshed substance on current undertakings, climate, sports and amusement 
• Social media websites: Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Linkedin 
• Portfolio websites: Showcase coding projects, contributions, and skills 

PROCESS

Website building is a comprehensive process involving several ideations and implementation stages. The core phases associated with website building are analysis, design, development, testing & review, deployment, and maintenance.

Website buidling is a skill that takes years of higher education, training programs and practice to master.

It’s no surprise that most business owners don’t know where to start when approaching the website building process.

That’s why we’re here to take you through the seven steps of the website development process.

What Is Website Development?

Website development is a broad term associated with the process of building and maintaining websites.

At its core, website development refers to web markup and coding, which are enabled by languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However, it also includes other aspects such as content management system (CMS) management, Ecommerce integrations and migrations, security configurations and more.

The Website Development Process In 7 Steps

From planning to launch, we’ve broken the website development process into seven key steps to follow. But before we start, we’ve put the steps into a flowchart to help with visualization:

1. Define Your Project

The first step in the website development process is to define the goals for your project.

These typically include:

• Business details: Define your offering, purpose, unique value proposition, mission, vision, stakeholders etc.
• Business goals: Set clear, measurable deliverables for your website to develop the most effective strategy, including the KPIs you’ll use to measure performance.
• Target audience: Define your target audience and research their preferences, likes and dislikes, study their online habits and more to get to know them and their expectations.
• Competition: Research your competition, analyze strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan to position your brand on the market.

Take a look at rideshare brand Lyft’s unique value proposition as a high-quality example of defining a project’s key values and differentiators from the competition:

[Source: Lyft]

2. Plan Your Website

Next, the planning process. Define your website’s layout, from landing page to product pages, key conversion points and more. Here, you’ll need to create:

• A sitemap: A sitemap is a bird’s eye view of your site that determines the list of pages, their placement and relationship to each other on the website. It includes both user-facing elements and those intended for web crawlers (such as Google). A site map helps define and organize your web content, allowing your strategist and designer to go deeper into planning the look, feel and functionality for each page.
• A wireframe: A wireframe is the layout of each individual page of your site. It outlines and the elements and content, from headlines to CTAs and subscription boxes. The wireframe should cover both desktop and mobile versions.

This stage of website development will help you plan your conversion funnel and user journey for each page of your website.

3. Design Your Website

Next, move to the user interface (UI) design stage to introduce your branding and complete the look and feel of your website.

Define each branding element, from your color palette, logo and iconography to the images and videos you’ll use.

These branding elements should remain consistent across all channels, from your website to your social media pages, marketing materials, newsletters and more.

Consistent branding helps create a memorable visual identity for your brand, which increases recognizability and promotes trust.

For example, we all associate Nike with bright colors, vivid imagery, bold typography and of course, the Nike swoosh.

[Source: Nike]

4. Create Content

Step 4 of the process is to plan and create your content. Depending on your target audience, content creation may include, (but is not limited to):

• Landing pages
• Product/service descriptions
• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Blog posts
• Videos
• Images
• Newsletters
• White papers
• Social media posts

Create your content based on your target audience. Research where they spend their time and define what type of content they’re most likely to interact and connect with.

Use strategic keyword optimization throughout your content to answer the search intent of your potential customers and encourage purchasing decisions.

From home decor and shopping reels to engagement questions and funny videos, Target is a perfect example of content tailored towards a target audience.

[Source: Target via Instagram]

5. Develop Your Website

Once you have defined your goals, planned your design, created your branding elements and devised a content plan, it’s time for development.

You’ll need backend and frontend developers to build your website, using industry best practices and detailed specification documents.

Prominent technologies used in the web development process

There are a wide array of technologies, including programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools that are extensively used to create highly functional web applications and websites.

It is important for you to have a comprehensive understanding of the tech stack needed to build highly optimized websites to help you decide your budget and hiring requirements. The tech stack needed for the web development process can be majorly divided into two categories: front-end and back-end development.

Front-end tech stack for web development

When building a website, your front-end technologies can greatly impact the overall development process. A wide variety of front-end technologies are available, each with unique features, strengths, and weaknesses. Choosing the right technology can make a huge difference in the speed and efficiency of your development process. Some of the most popular front-end technologies include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue.js, and Bootstrap among others.

Each of these technologies has its own unique capabilities that can be leveraged to create an engaging and user-friendly website. When used together, they can provide a powerful foundation for any web development project. The choice of technologies that you use depends on the size and complexity of the web development project.

Back-end tech stack for web development

The backend is the core of web development as it provides the business logic and data fetching capabilities for the user actions on the front end. The back-end includes the server that processes all of the website’s files, the database that stores the website’s data, and the application that runs the website. All of these back-end technologies work together to ensure that when you visit a website, everything works properly in sync as expected.

An impressive list of back-end technologies provides the necessary functionality and features to make your website powerful, scalable, and optimized for enhanced user experience. Some prominent backend technologies used in web development are Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Oracle, and MySQL, among others. The choice of your backend tech stack will be guided by your project requirements and budget.

From the platform you choose to different features and functionalities, your website should be built with the ability to scale to match your growth potential.

Experts in this field, like our Digital Silk developers, use research-backed insights to develop your website based on several different factors, including your industry, your offering, your target audience and more.

6. Test Your Website

Before you push your website live, don’t forget to test it.

Your developers should check the functionality of all the elements on your website. The aim is to detect any issues such as broken links and compatibility with different devices to ensure everything works properly.

Use validators to check if the code follows the standards, test the site’s speed and ensure it’s responsive on all devices.

Once manual and automated testing is complete, your website is ready to go into a live server and launch.

Deployment

The deployment phase in web development is the process of putting the website or application live. This usually involves transferring the code from a development or staging server to a production server. The steps involved in deployment can vary depending on the size and complexity of the project and may include tasks such as configuring the environment, compressing files, setting up caching, and setting up load balancing.

The deployment phase can be complex, and it is important to have a robust plan in place before starting. Since it is the final stage where the website goes live, it is crucial to ensure that all the necessary contingencies are in place and the developers are prepared for different scenarios. Once the site or application is live, it needs to be monitored and maintained to ensure that it remains accessible and performant.

7. Maintain Your Website

Congratulations, your site is live! But the work doesn’t end there. As your business grows, you may need to increase the number of pages, add more functionalities, update features and more.

Regular maintenance includes:

• Editing existing content
• Adding content
• Fixing bugs and issues
• Dosing site backups
• Installing plugins

Modern web design trends are constantly changing, and new technology provides opportunities for advanced features and functionalities. Hiring a professional web design agency can ensure your brand is never left in the dust by the competition.