The Web development Process
I often get asked the process for developing a website. I thought I’d provide an overview of how experienced developers understand an organisations requirements & utilise them to create a professional website that engages their target audience.
The web development process comprises of 7 stages.
- Requirement gathering
- Design stage
- Design sign off
- Development stage
- Development sign off & training
- Quality Assurance & Testing
- Go Live
1. Requirements Gathering
This is the most important stage in the process and has a sole purpose of establishing who you are, your products/services & your target market. Based on your requirements I provide a range of ideas on the most suitable way to engage with your customers & the kind of functionality & modules you require to manage your website.
A module can be thought of as a group of functionality that allows you to manage a product or service If we use a recruitment agency for the following example, a recommended module would be “vacancies”. This type of module would provide the functionality to post & manage job vacancies within your site. A vacancy module can comprise of a range of components such as the job title, salary, location, job description & application form.
Modules are a great way of providing specific content relating to your products & services, ensuring engagement whilst meeting the needs of your customers. Your users can also utilise these components as search parameters, allowing them to find specific vacancies based on job title, salary & location, providing an overall greater user experience.
Your branding will also be addressed at this stage. Whether you have a logo, colour scheme and any brand guidelines that need to be implemented into the design. Once requirements have been established & met, a design brief is provided that details the kind of pages your website needs e.g homepage, about us page, module listing page, module item page, team page & contact page, along with any modules you require to promote your products & services.
2. Design Stage
Based on everything we’ve discussed in the requirement gathering stage, the design process begins with the aim of creating engaging page layouts in order to deliver your products and services for your specific target audience.
If we’ve established that brand guidelines exist, your logo, fonts & colour scheme will be implemented into the page designs. On the other hand if you’re a new business or looking to modernise your current brand, examples of potential logos, fonts & colour palettes will be provided at this stage.
Once the designs are complete, they’re provided to the client to ensure the requirements have been met. When my client is completely satisfied with all the website page layouts, the designs are signed off.
3. Design Sign Off
The website page layouts provided are the blueprints for developing your website. It’s important that clients are completely satisfied with the designs before the development stage begins as any alterations to designs once development has began may effect time scales & delivery times
4. Development
Following design sign off, development begins. The development of each page of your website will follow the design layouts that you’ve signed off. All websites developed are bespoke, using the most up-to-date & modern technologies with specific functionality following the requirements of my clients.
Your website will be completely responsive, ensuring your users can view your website on a range of devices such as phone, tablets & desktops. I recommend WordPress for a content management system (CMS) & Woocommerce for businesses that require bespoke ecommerce functionality.
No templates, pre-built websites or website builders will ever be used. My work is completely bespoke, ensuring my websites are tailored specifically for my clients business requirements & target audience
5. Development Sign off & training
Once your website is fully developed, my clients are provided with logins to their WordPress dashboard & full training is provided to ensure full usage of all functionality can be maximised to its full potential. Once my clients are happy with everything, the development stage is signed off.
6. Quality Assurance & Testing
No web development process is complete without testing and quality assurance, ensuring your website goes online without any technical problems that your customers may encounter
7. Go Live
Probably the most exciting stage throughout the process, putting your site live for the world to see.
That’s a tricky question. It really depends on the size of the website required, whether you need a brochure or an ecommerce website can effect the timescales involved. Timescales are often discussed after the requirements gathering stage as it gives me a better idea of your direction, target audience and the functionality you require.
Without fully knowing your requirements, it’s very difficult to determine costs. The websites i develop are always custom to ensure they adhere to client requirements. I never use website builders or pre-purchased templates. Contact me directly and lets discuss your requirements
In terms of legal stuff i thought it best to provide a snippet from my contract. If you’d like to see the full contract then please contact me directly.
“You’ll own the website we design for you plus the visual elements that we create for it. We’ll give you source files and finished files and you should keep them somewhere safe as we’re not required to keep a copy. You own all intellectual property rights of text, images, site specification and data you provided, unless someone else owns them.
We’ll own any intellectual property rights we’ve developed prior to, or developed separately from this project and not paid for by you. We’ll own the unique combination of these elements that constitutes a complete design and we’ll license its use to you, exclusively and in perpetuity for this project only, unless we agree otherwise.”
I can provide hosting for your website. I offer a competitive price of £50 per year, per website. This includes security, backups & technical support.
There are a variety of companies where you can purchase domain names such as Ionos, 123reg, GoDaddy to name a few
I always recommend Fasthosts to my clients. Myself and my clients have purchased 100’s of domain names from them over the years, they’re reliable, competitive, have great customer service & an easy to use control panel
The best way is to contact me & we can take it from there. I’m always happy to provide advice to organisations looking to make changes to their website & brand. Quotes for websites are always free and no obligation.
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