In this article, I will be discussing the process for a project, from start to finish. I will use multiple examples throughout, but primarily this is geared toward building websites or web apps. I think it can be applied to any creative process though. Just take the chunks you need and carry on with your life.
The most exciting part of any project is the beginning when “anything is possible.” More often than not, the first conversation I have with a client is vague and non-technical. They want X, Y, and maybe Z.
The Importance of Research
This will come up numerous times, as it doesn’t fit in a specific part of the timeline. Basically, try and learn everything you can about the subject you are going to be working on. For instance, when I worked on a card manufacturing website, I looked at their competitors to get an idea of what the customers were used to seeing.
Despite conventional wisdom, the core part of website development and design is not necessarily the coding process. Indeed, such technologies as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript give the web we know its shape and define the way we interact with the information. But what usually stays behind the scenes and, at the same time, remains the crucial part of the website development life cycle are the stages of preliminary information gathering, detailed planning, and post-launch maintenance.
Website Development Timeline
When you think of building a website, your thoughts rotate around two main issues – price and time. These two values depend largely on the size and scope of the project. To outline the whole development process, you can create a website development timeline, adding tasks and establishing milestones for your project. It is the best way to track your project implementation to make sure you keep up with the deadline. At Alt Agency we are dedicated to clarifying all of the matters required.
Gathering Information: Purpose, Main Goals, and Target Audience
This stage, the stage of discovering and researching, determines what the subsequent steps will look like. The most important task at this point is to get a clear understanding of your future website purposes, the main goals you wish to get, and the target audience you want to attract to your site. Such kind of a website development questionnaire helps to develop the best strategy for further project management.
News portal differs from entertainment websites, and online resources for teenagers looks different than sites for adults. Different types of websites provide visitors with different functionality which means that different technologies should be used according to the purposes. A well-described and detailed plan made on the basis of this pre-development data can protect you from spending extra resources on solving unexpected issues such as design changes or adding functionality that wasn’t initially planned.
Planning: Sitemap and Wireframe Creation
At this stage of the website development cycle, the developer creates the data that can give a customer an opportunity to judge how the entire site will look like.
On the basis of the information that was gathered together in the previous phase, the sitemap is created.
The sitemap should describe the relations between the main areas of your website. Such representation could help understand how usable the final product will be. It can show you the “relationship” between the different pages of a website, so you can judge how easy it will be for the end-user to find the required information or service if he starts from the main page. The main reason behind the sitemap creation is to build a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate website.
