What Are the Important Steps for Website Development?

So you want your business to shine. You might have this amazing idea you want to share to your customers, and it might be short of revolutionary – you only need a business website for people to visit. Thing is, building a website takes more than just reading about web development. If you want to build an amazing business website, you’ve got to know the basics first. And this article will do just that – just what are the important steps for website development?

Do You Need A Website Development?

If you need a quick refresher on the importance of having a business website, some statistics might come to mind. A report suggests that as much as 29-percent of small businesses actually don’t have websites to call their own. Not remedying this can be disadvantageous, given around 50-percent of potential prospects, leads, and clients who visit sites are also interest in the About Us pages of business sites. In fact, 65-percent of viewers actually check out the contact information of a business.  

In your case, your business website can actually serve a lot of purposes. Aside from being a means to contact you, it can be your “vehicle” of expression and to show how you can build value for your clients and your industry in general. This is also the perfect place for you to advertise your products and services, and even have an on line store built inside of it as well. Possibilities are almost endless in terms of web design, which makes web development such an attractive prospect for small and big businesses alike.

Website Development Steps: What Are They?

If you want to build a business website the way we do it at Pnetform, you might think of it as an impossible task. However, it’s important to remember that web development is actually something you can learn through time.

Our Pnetform web development services are built on a foundation of trust and creativity – and as such it helps that while you can rely on us to meet your needs on a technical level, you should also be aware of steps we do to make your business website come to life. Here’s some of them:

Gather the relevant information of your site

You can’t “just” make a website. It needs to be built with a few things in mind – primarily your target audience, your main goals, adn your purpose. You need to gather these information in order to get a rough idea as to the kind of website you need to present to your audience. Having these cleared out allow you to approach design in a straightforward manner.

Planning Your Sitemap and Wireframe

With the above in mind, now’s the time for you to create the sitemap and your wireframe. The sitemap speaks for itself – it’s the map through which designers can refer to when creating the website. The website is supposed to “lead the way” towards what the site actually contains. As a general rule, users should be able to access information they need in less than three clicks. It’s in this stage where you can also make mock-ups of your website.

Designing and reviewing page layouts and overall site design

It’s in this process where everything related to design is created. All the information you’ve gathered in the previous steps culminates in a more creative process here. You need to make a website layout, be it in the form of a graphic sketch or an actual design, that you can thoroughly review before execution. It’s in this step where you also review all the design aspects of your site – including videos, photos, images, and graphics – prior to actual coding.

Creating and assembling elements and content

Once you’ve fully conceptualized your website, the crafting stage partially begins. This involves making all the elements you have to place in your website, primarily content. You need to put into writing the “voice” of your brand and what you want to communicate. This comes in the form of copies to be found in your home page, the other sub-pages, and preliminary posts you want published in your new site. When you’re doing this for a client, the client normally provides the content to be migrated

Coding and implementing website elements

Here’s where you actually get to implement your design plans. Coding is where you can start crafting your website. During this process, you can see for yourself whether elements and graphics created during the previous stages actually fit within your site’s parameters. You normally do this by making the home page first, and then followed by the other sub-pages. You can do this best by following the sitemap or the website hierarchy. This is also the stage where you can check whether the servers can actually handle CMS and frameworks you’ve designed.

Testing the code for review, and actual launch

Before you proceed with your actual launch, you’ve got to test and review the code you have. While businesses like Pnetform can pull off programming and coding your website, this process involves a lot of back-and-forth. This is because this step involves ensuring not only does your resulting code fit your design parameters, but that it does so in the most efficient way possible. This is the best step for you to see whether you can apply best search engine optimization (SEO) practices, and if there are easier, cheaper, and better ways of pulling off your site’s needs.

Regular updating and website maintenance

When you do get everything set up for your site, “going live” seems to be the next logical step. And most of the time it is – but your web development essentials don’t just stop there. When you finally set your site to go live, you now have to proceed to perhaps the trickiest part of web development which is maintenance. Remember that while website domains do stay with you for as long as you pay for them, trends in web development can change. In this stage, you have to stay alert for bugs and mishaps that can occur throughout the lifetime of your website and be on the lookout on what to change. You should also note whether your website does satisfy the needs of your customers, which you can check by observing website statistics and numbers relevant to your business.

Website Development: Know Your Essentials

Learning about building a website isn’t as easy as it sounds, but web development isn’t an impossible endeavor. While services such as our Pnetform web development can help you meet your website needs on a technical level, it does help for you to know the ins and outs of building a business website. Hopefully, the above points have given you a brief background on the essential steps of making your business website come to life.