Web development services do not only involve designing and developing a website. But it is a more thorough process that includes a complete life cycle. And this life cycle needs your – a business owner’s – involvement to successfully finish your website development.
If you are a business owner and want to create a website for your business, knowing the whole web development process is important. It gives you an idea about how your hired web development company will carry out the web development process.
So, the article is a guide to the complete web development life cycle, explaining various phases of the website development services. Referring to this guide, you understand the whole process of your website development task and make yourself prepared for your involvement in the process.
Various phases in the life cycle of web development services
Research and Analysis
The first and important phase in the web development life cycle is researching and analysing. This step will decide how the later stages will fall. In this phase, your hired web development company will examine your industry, target audience, and feasibility of your feature requirements.
A fair amount of time spent on research and analysis will help your developer craft the perfect strategy for your web development process. And furthermore, provide critical insights and knowledge to develop a flawless website and web app.
Planning and Wireframing
All the information gathered in the previous stage helps create an effective plan for designing and implementing the site. Your web development partner makes important decisions at this stage, such as selecting the tech-stack, creating a sitemap, planning the layout, UI/UX, and wireframing.
Among all these tasks, sitemap and wireframe creation are the important ones. The sitemap helps you craft the structure of your site. And wireframes help you define the relationship between various pages of your website. Plenty of free and premium available tools help you create these two quickly.
Designing
Once you have wireframes and sitemap ready, the next stage comes the designing of the website. Here, web designers handle the project and design innovative and attractive user interfaces while taking care of the seamless experience of your website.
The web designer brings the rough sketch of your site to life with creative logos, layouts, typography, animations, and colour combination. The target audience research conducted in the first stage plays a vital role in influencing the website’s tone and voice.
Content Creation
The creative designs and advanced features will not be able to allure your potential customers if you fail to communicate with them properly. And that is where content marketing can help you. Good quality content will help you protect your company’s purpose and brand values to your customers.
In the content creation stage of the web development life cycle, your web development partners will create enchanting content and copy for your website. With effective call-to-actions, headlines, and content, your site will have the potential to convert visitors into customers.
Coding and Developing
Now comes the most challenging phase of the website development life cycle. In this phase, your attractive website will be functional and serve its purpose to your business. The developer you have hired programs various pre-decided features and functionalities.
There is a high chance of things going wrong in this phase, and inexpert developers may make things even worse. That is why you should always hire developers after a thorough assessment. Here our guide to hiring the perfect web development company will help you.
Testing and Quality Assurance
Although the testing goes hand in hand with website development and coding, it should also be performed separately after completing the coding phase of the web development life cycle. A rigorous testing cycle eliminates every bug and technical flaw from your website.
The company you have hired will have an in-house or remote team of QA testers for testing your website. They will utilise tools and various testing methods to strengthen your website against potential issues.
Deployment & Maintenance
Once the QA team gives a thumbs up, your website will be ready to deploy on the server and start serving your business. Your web development partner will host your website on the server using File Transfer Protocol. But your web development life cycle does not end here.
Instead, it enters into a lifelong phase of maintenance. Your site will start serving your business on the web from now on. But it will need proper maintenance and care from time to time. The web development company often offers extensive free support to maintain websites on the web. But if yours does not provide, you can hire dedicated web developers whenever you need.
Conclusion
Your involvement in the web development process is vital as a business owner. So you must have a basic understanding of the web development life cycle. And that is why we have compiled this article to make you aware of the various facets and stages of web development.