What You Need To Know About Website Development Processes for Businesses

A good website development process is the key to achieving long-lasting results for online businesses. But what is a “web development process”? Are all website development processes carried out in the same way? And if so, what do you need to know about building a website from scratch?

In this article, we’re going to explore the different phases that make up professional website development processes: the strategies behind them, the fundamental concepts, and the key factors that can turn blandly structured websites into real powerhouses.

At DarwinApps, we’ve fine-tuned our website development process to hit all the major points discussed in this article. Gradually, our projects have evolved to achieve the best possible return on investment for both SMEs and large companies.

Let’s take a further look.

The Complete Website Development Strategy

What is a website development strategy? And how is it structured? Building websites is often complicated, requiring thorough inspection before developers can even get to the “fun” parts. You might be tempted to jump right into coding, but that’s not how it works.

There are several major areas to consider before actually shipping the finished product. These can be narrowed down into seven specific phases:

1. Discovery — This is when the team starts exploring the vision that lies behind the project. Included in this phase are idea proposals discussed with the site owner to achieve a specific goal elicitation, as well as getting a first look at the features that might make it to the final design.
2. Auditing — The first deliverable will be an in-depth audit that takes into consideration many aspects of the site owner’s business, ideally conceptualizing a funnel that not only converts users into customers, but is also relevant to the industry at hand.
3. Brainstorming — It might be an unheralded part of the process, but brainstorming is invaluable in achieving designs that truly hit the nail on its head. Visualizing core components, jotting down concepts, listing features; they all help to get the job done.
4. Design — Once the auditing process is completed, we get down to designing the user interface, the key visual aspect of the project. Prototyping different design views is extremely important as it allows the team to conceptualize real, actionable elements of the site both globally and on a page by page basis.
5. Development — The heavy-duty portion of most website development processes is the development phase. Programming the user and administrative interface portion requires a lot of detail-oriented work, and can take a while depending on the requirements of the site owner.
6. Quality Assurance — A step that is often overlooked, quality assurance is essential for any good website development process. This is the time when all major elements and features are thoroughly tested to guarantee bulletproof, continuous, bug-free operation.
7. Deployment — Finally, the website is ready for live deployment on the internet, where visitors can interact with it. At this stage, everything that was previously prepared gets optimized to work seamlessly with cutting-edge server-side technologies, and the website is taken live in a step-by-step manner.

Sure, this is a lot to take in, but having a structured workflow is much better than winging projects requiring detail-oriented work. If the research is done properly and the auditing process shows data that’s highly relevant to the owner, the rest will fall right into place.

The Business Side of Website Development Processes

Websites are usually built with a specific goal in mind, and website development processes are made to take that into account. For example, an e-commerce website might need to consider both the “buyer journey” and the “customer experience” for its sales funnel.

Requirements of that kind really show the difference between a hack-it-together design strategy and an efficient website development process. Business and marketing concepts need to be integrated into the design; they cannot be simply thrown in as an afterthought!

The business side of website development processes usually requires the designer to be conscious about psychological effects that user interfaces have on end users as well. Things like button placement, color theory, interoperability — they are all crucial to business owners.

Of course, you wouldn’t achieve a great website without good branding. Often enough, a proper website development process requires constant back-and-forth between designers and developers in order to achieve a consistent look that really tells a story about the brand.

Furthermore, designers and developers usually work together on what’s inherently more important than anything else — intuitiveness and ease of use. Without these two factors, a pretty website would prove to be inefficient at converting users into customers.

When Security is King by Design

You might think of security as that one thing that can always be improved upon, but in reality, there’s nothing more dangerous than underestimating the ease with which your website can be taken down — especially if you’re a large business targeted by many people.

Security needs to be integrated into your website development process by design; you can’t just build a website and then think about what additional security measures to take in order to protect it from things like phishing, DDoS attacks, brute force, etc.

Thankfully, there are some excellent ways to mitigate these incredibly problematic security issues, and we’ve compiled a list of them for easy understanding:

• Secure Hosting — There are plenty of hosting companies out there claiming to be “the fastest”, “the greatest”, and so on. However, hosting companies can only be as reliable as the technology that they use, and most rely on third-party software.

That’s why it’s important to invest in secure hosting companies that do not skimp on security for razor-thin margins on shared hosting accounts or use ill-equipped servers that do not match security requirements in our day and age.

• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates — SSL certificates are pretty much ubiquitous nowadays, but it wasn’t always this way. Have you ever noticed that lock on the left side of your URL bar? That means an SSL certificate is installed.

Installing an SSL certificate is almost always a standard requirement today. This is because the internet is still widely populated with unsecured websites that aren’t encrypted, unlike those with SSL certificates installed.

• Content Delivery Networks or CDNs — CDNs are networks of servers spread throughout the world that help website owners mitigate the problems of reaching users that might be too far away from their current host, leading to slow speeds.

CDNs are also great at blocking malicious attacks. This is because the website’s traffic is “filtered” by the network, making it easy to spot DDoS attacks and block them before they can seriously threaten the site owner’s bottom line.

All of these measures are standard, but there’s one thing that can never be beaten; good old backups. If you back up your website regularly enough, and if you have the tools to bring it back up in just a few minutes (or a few hours for larger ones), then you’ve hit the jackpot.

Fancy Doesn’t Always Mean Best

In the end, fancy designs are always those that catch the attention of most prospects. It’s not always clear, however, whether an aesthetically pleasing website design does anything to the business side of things. You might just end up spending a lot more on little added value.

That’s why we at DarwinApps focus on what matters most — your growth. It is in our best interest to achieve designs that do exactly what you need them to, and we use all the techniques described in this article to guarantee a secure, well-built website or application.

Pretty designs can obviously coexist with user-friendly interfaces, but they need to be thoughtfully taken through a series of steps before going through with the final deployment stage. We believe in websites that achieve their pre-planned purpose, and we love best practices.

We also believe that there’s always room for improvement in modern website development processes. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on how websites should be built, or if you have any further questions, make sure to leave a comment down below!