Continuing my previous post on the remaining steps of Website design and development…
Step Three: Design
You now know your business objectives and you’ve scoped out your project. Now, it’s time to determine the look and feel of your site.
Your target audience is one of the key factors taken into consideration. A site aimed at baby boomers, for example, will look much different than one meant for a financial institution. As part of the design phase, it is also important to incorporate elements such as the company logo or colors to ensure that you have consistent branding across all media.
Work with your design team to create a couple of prototype designs for your web site. Most web designers use Adobe Photoshop and will send you a jpeg file to review. Often times you will be sent an email with the mock-ups for your web site, while other designers take it a step further by giving you access to a secure area of their web site meant for customers to view work in progress.
Once you’ve sat down with your web designer and wire framed the website, hold a meeting with the stakeholders of the project to get feedback on the same. Remember that it’s easier to make changes to the design when it is in the ‘Design’ phase rather than when it’s in the ‘Development’ phase. Also, run the wire frame by a sample user group to get their feedback on the design as well as to get a sense of user behavior – this will help you make the website more intuitive. Get feedback from both the stakeholder and user group and implement the same. Run another meeting with both groups for feedback and after getting changes and implementing them, freeze the design.
In this phase, communication between both you, your design team, your stakeholders and your user group is crucial to ensure that the final web site meets expectations.
Step Four: Development
Here your development team works to create your website. They will typically take all of the individual graphic elements from the prototype and use them to create the working website.
The home page is developed first followed by a “shell” for the interior pages. This is your wire frame during development. Only if it’s critically vital, can you make changes here else no changes to design and functionality should be done during this phase. The shell serves as a template for the content pages of the site, as it contains the main navigational structure for the web site. Once the shell has been created, the content can be distributed throughout the site, in the appropriate areas.
Ensure that your programmers have a good understanding of front-end web development and are able to write valid XHTML / CSS code that complies to current web standards.
Step Five: Testing
Here, the development team will attend to the final details and run a stress test on the website. They will test things such as the complete functionality of forms or other scripts, as well last testing for last minute compatibility issues (viewing differences between different web browsers), ensuring that your web site is optimized to be viewed properly in the most recent browser versions. At this point, run an alpha test and open it for testing from your user group as well as stakeholders and other willing testers from your team or the stakeholders.
As part of testing, the development team should check to all the code written for your web site to make sure that it’s valid. Valid code means that your site meets the current web development standards – this is helpful when checking for issues such as cross-browser compatibility as mentioned above.
Once you’ve identified issues as part of the alpha testing, get the development team to remedy the same and then open up the site for Beta or pre-launch phase. This will mean having your website live on a sub-domain like new.yourwebsitename.com. Also, have a new website invitation on the top of your current website along with a feedback tab asking existing site visitors for feedback.
Step Six: Launch
Once you’ve completed Beta testing and everyone’s satisfied with the outcome. it’s time to launch. Typically, do this at the end of the business week. The devs will use a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload the web site files to your server. Once the web site uploaded to the server, the site should be put through one last run-through. This is just precautionary, to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site continues to be fully functional. This essentially will mark the official launch of your site.
Next comes the very important SEO part where after completing the technical SEO part of the website like 301 redirects, 404 error pages, server load balancing issues etc you actually begin on-page SEO implementation. Here you optimize your website to ensure that key elements like the page title, on-page content, meta description and keyword tags are tweaked to reflect your SEO strategy. After that of course, comes the linking part with the right anchor text, both internally and externally as well as ensuring that images are optimized in addition to renaming any urls that are not optimized.
A quick note on a CMS :
A CMS (Content Management System) allows a website owner to be more hands-on. With a CMS, the programmers typically utilize online open-source software to develop a database-driven site for your needs. Drupal, Joomal and WordPress are the most common CMS systems used these days. A CMS gives you the ability to edit the content areas of the web site as you have access to a back-end administrative area, where you can use an online text editor (similar to Microsoft Word). It’s possible to edit, add, modify new pages, images and content yourself.
