A web development project doesn’t start with coding and stop with the website launch. A good website development company makes sure that all criteria are met.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Developing a website isn’t much different than building a house. In order to do so, experts in engineering, design/architecture, project management, creative, and development must work together to understand and achieve specific goals. First, let’s discuss the three critical phases of website development that get us to the point of development and theming. While the importance of these phases is sometimes overlooked or discounted, each step is crucial to the success of your website and marketing efforts. Overlooking or underplanning in the initial phases of website development will lead to a mediocre website at best, or even complete failure to achieve your business goals. The initial phase for building a successful website is discovery and planning. Through several weeks/months of interviews, site audits, marketing research, and brainstorming, we gather as much information as possible about the project. This process helps the team identify project goals and objectives, document users and their goals, research competitors, assess technical risk and obtain existing assets such as creative briefs, branding guidelines, logos, brochures, and site analytics reports. If this process is done correctly, a well-defined project blueprint should evolve from the information you gather which includes: While we’ve used this process for several years, we constantly evaluate it for efficiency and to keep up with industry changes. Mobility has played a major role in many of our changes. Once the blueprint has been established, a user experience architect begins wireframing the site architecture based on information gathered during the discovery process. There are several tools (OmniGraffle, Balsamiq, etc.) that can help with this process. Many use Axure, which is an interactive wire framing tool. Axure allows us to rapidly create online prototypes to show the structure of a website, custom user paths, important user interface elements and their position, and relationships between web pages. This process involves: While wireframes are being completed by the experience architect, one should leverage the creative brief, brand schematic, and project branding guidelines from the strategy document to begin shaping the overall tone of the website. The main objective during this process is to set creative expectations, which gives the design team a better direction for competitive designs. We’ve found that this process also saves time during the creative process as it provides a very clear direction at a fraction of the time of creating full design concepts. If your process has not changed for several years, I can guarantee you need to assess and refine it. Technology changes quickly and with those changes come updates to business and project processes. LevelTen evaluates its process every two weeks and discusses ways to improve based on technical and environmental challenges. Doing this opens dialog between team members so that you can create better products, more efficiently to provide better value to your customers. Now, let’s learn about the uses of development tools that you need to pickup for website development.
