When looking to develop a website, there are at least 8 Steps in the website preparation stage, before you ever get to the development phases. Miss these out and you may find your website does not meet the mark.
What is the purpose? Who is your audience? What is the return on investment? Then, as part of this, realise that the process is not a oncer but will be an ongoing process. The effort to maintain the site will be an order of magnitude more work than the original investment. If you ask me for help, then this will be the process.
1. Consultation and Specification
Clarify your goals for the website and the people you would like to reach. We help you devise an online strategy and discuss components of your website. Set a budget. Decide who will do it. We go through a guide and fill it in as part of this process. Using wireframes and other technology the website can be designed to be user “friendly”. What will your potential visitors want to see and get.
2. Content design and collection
Decide your text, images, sitemap, attachments and media files to the contractor to include in your website. Plan out a build date and a website schedule. get your registered domain name and configure your hosting. If you purchase copywriting, photography or logo design through a third party, decide on the design and features.
3. Design
When your content is clear, the design process, using the brief developed in stage one, and the photos and text supplied start to take shape. If you do a fixed price contract, the number of pages, and content can be developed through wireframes to make sure you like the look and feel before any substantial work begins.
4. Construction and Programming
When you have signed off on the designs, we will start construction of your test website. Your website construction will be overseen by your project producer, with the work completed by our team of programmers, web developers and graphic designers. Depending on your website, the construction may also use specialist flash designers and multimedia experts. Sites should be primarily focused on mobile devices first, and desktop second.
5. Search Engine Optimisation
The phrases you provide in this document to edit your supplied text, menu items and headings to help your website rank better for these terms.
6. Testing
When construction is almost complete, we will test your website to make sure it displays correctly on the most common browsers (as discussed in your web prep guide) and check the ability for your website to be read by people using screen readers. You will then have a chance to review your testing website before it goes live.
7. Deployment
When you are happy with the site, we will move your testing website to its live hosting location and do further extensive testing. You will also be sent instructions on how to access your statistics, update parts of your website and request maintenance or upgrades.
8. Review, maintain and upgrade
Going live is just the beginning of the journey. As you receive customer feedback you may wish to make changes to your website – some of this you will be able to do yourself (how much varies depending on your package), but the rest you may want to do as part of a maintenance plan.
Further Resources
There are multiple resources on the web. Check out this one or head over to Freelancer or UpWork to get some web support. Or contact me.