Eight important stages of website development

Website development has become necessary for businesses to acquire stability and solid profitability.

Websites assist individuals, brands, and companies in extending their businesses and reaching out to a target audience without location limitations.

It is a must have tool to promote a business objective or support activity. Despite misperception to be a simple task to complete, it is vital not to label equally. For the question: “Is website development easy?”

Well, the answer is: "it depends." Website development varies from market needs and requirements to finances and programming skills. Shortly, website development can take long processes if the expectations tend to reach proficiency and genuinely attract the audience.

A perfect website is achievable if the priorities and strategies are drawn precisely, and for that, you will need to hire web developers.

What are the stages of website development?

If you keep reading and still wonder to find an answer to the question: “So, what are the relevant stages of website development business owners miss out?” The reply is: “Just keep reading”.

Different individuals separate different priorities for website development. However, the accurate structure of any website development still remains the same. Here are the main stages of website development:  

Step 1: Clarify your project objectives

Step 2: Create a sitemap

Step 3: Make an outstanding design

Step 4: Content and SEO

Step 5: Development process

Step 6: Test your product

Step 7: It's time to launch

Step 8: Keep an eye on the progress

Website development process

Now let’s learn website development as a time-taking process more profoundly. It is essential to keep accurate standards of website structure from the beginning to increase its positive impact on business potential and growth.   

Clarify project objectives

Initially, pinpoint your project objectives to clarify the right expectations from the website development. Ask yourself questions like:

❖    What is the project goal? 

❖    Who is the project beneficial for? (target group of users)

❖    What are the needs/requirements the project aims to meet?

❖    How will the website facilitate the goal achievement process?

❖    How can the outcome be measured?

Knowing the exact answers to these questions will help you take a step forward to draw clear expectations.

Create a sitemap

The project objective clarification is essential for you to have precise KPIs, but it also assists the next step, which is website sitemap creation. Despite the format difference, it provides valuable information to users and search engines.

A sitemap for users, known as HTML, aims to help users navigate the website and learn how to move from one page to another.

 Conversely, a sitemap, for search engines like Google, known as XML, is a guide to important website pages, facilitating the crawling process. A sitemap is crucial to reach your target audience, improve user experience and send a straightforward message to search engines about your website’s essence (intent)  and objectives.

An outstanding design

Despite the usefulness of your website, you cannot reach your target audience and have good traffic if your design lacks attractiveness. Users always give preference to eye-catching and aesthetic website design.

Apply proper design elements based on your target audience's requirements. Take into account that the preferences of potential users differ, as well as their expectations.  

Content and SEO requirements

Content is one of the significant factors to consider while building a website. In the world of digitalisation with an enormous flow of information, users seek value and quality in content.

Meanwhile, content cannot work without SEO which opens space to learn more about your audience and competitors. SEO will be the pulse of the website and help you improve your working strategies.

Development process

The development process reflects all the essential stages, including the technical effort to maintain the website functionality, visualisation, and quality to high standards. 

Test the product

After finishing all the stages mentioned above, you need to test the website functionality multiple times to get convinced it has no errors to go through and fix. Make sure the expectations and outcomes meet accordingly.  

Website launch

Finally, it’s launch time. The website development is successfully implemented and ready to produce corresponding results and speak about your business value. Congratulations!

Keep an eye on the progress

Don’t stay calm, as you need to keep your eye on the website's further growth. In the era of rapid developments and adjustments, you need to work hard to keep up with changes to meet the market needs.

Keep doing your research to stay in shape and hit website development to sustain your high standards in the growing industry.