web

INTRODUCTION WEB

1. Understand Clients’ Needs

Understanding clients’ requirements will drive a lot of things in a website development project. If they have already told the company about the budget, it will make the process even simpler.

However, it is recommended to first discuss the best for the website like technologies, frameworks, designing and other packages. It helps everybody to put the best of themselves to the website.

The real-time objective, budget, type of website, feature requirements, and the type of target audience are some key factors driving the cost estimation to develop a website, team deployment, technology-usage, type of website and lots of other important things that matter even post-development.

2. Wireframing of Website

After comprehending the requirements, the company can design a wireframe for the website. A wireframe is a low-fidelity blueprint of the website that helps clients’ understand the clients’ and developers to understand the structure of the website they want to develop.

The most popular tools to create wireframes of the website include InVision, Adobe XD, Slickplan, and Mindnode. Wireframe is quite similar to the sitemap that is complete and category-wise structure of all website pages on your website. It helps any user visiting your website to understand your website’s hierarchy within seconds.

3. Creating Website Prototype

A website prototype will not be necessarily created in every website development project but it indeed helps to keep things on the same page for clients and developers.

Having an interactive prototype helps clients visualize their own requirements and understand the hierarchy of pages. If they have some changes in the plan, this is the time.

A website prototype is comparatively more comprehensible than wireframe for the clients as it is of high-fidelity and may also consist of visuals. Professionals use tools like Proto.io, Origami, Axure and Mockingbird.

Prototyping a website is like asking for clients’ final approval for website design and also, to seek if there are any changes required by them.

4. Design Your Website

Now here is a segment that defines how your website is going to look like. Designing a website’s pages depend upon several significant things and a few of them are;

• Who is your audience?

• What functionality do you want to include?

• Make sure that design does not affect website’s efficiency i.e. in terms of page load speed

Let’s have a look at some important elements of web designing;

A) Ideate the Website Design

Before getting into the business of ‘codeplay’, the first thing web designers look for is ideas. They try to visualize an image of their website in their mind before transforming it into the code. It is about taking inspiration to create your website’ design. It helps them to streamline their skills to the requirements of their clients.

There are several websites that may help them take such inspiration;

• Behance

• Awwwards

• CSS Nectar

• Site Inspire

• Pinterest

B) Implementation of Different Visual Elements

Elements that visualize your information through shapes, lines, colors, fonts and other design entities help you create interactive web pages. Visual elements are probably the most significant part of any website.

From adding content to respective grids and layouts, putting right colors, fonts to compatible shapes, right textures, smart spacing, interactive images & icons, videos and other elements, a website design is personalized in the best way possible.

C) Adding Functional Elements

To optimize your visual elements, you need functionality on your web pages. A well-functioning website indulges in a rich user experience and ranks higher in search engine results.

• By implementing personalized navigation on your website, you retain your visitors. It dramatically improves your website’s overall user experience.

• Adding user interaction activities such as scrolling, clicking, typing in a smooth and high-compatible form of usage is another important functional element.

• It is evident that users attract faster to graphical elements than textual elements, thus incorporating animation can play a crucial role in enriching your website’s user experience.

• Make your page load faster.

D) Enabling Cross-Browser & Cross-Device Compatibility

Since your website users might be using different devices and browsers to access your website, you want that the user experience of the website is not diminished in such variations.

To counter such issues, website designers adopt either of two techniques to keep your website’s look managed;

• Adaptive Web Design

Whenever a user accesses your website, the browser creates a request to call the related web pages on the server. In that HTTP request, there is a field called ‘User Agent’ which means it would help them define the type of device the user is requesting that web page from. An adaptive website would track that device’s name from there.

Modern-age web design services can implement the usage of media queries where a CSS feature utilizes the different screen sizes to decide the view of the web pages.

• Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design makes changes in the viewing experience as per the percentage of respective grid layouts on a web page. Responsive web designs are comparatively more flexible than adaptive web design because the set of conditions they follow are not restricted by any literals anyway. It is the reason why it indulges in such a great screen size compatibility and user-experience.

5. Development

It is not web design vs web development anyway. After web design, you need to connect web pages with the database and server to integrate the data enabling functionality on your website. If you do not understand this, see this example; you see your pictures on Front End but they are uploaded through the back end and make them accessible to others.

Database organizes your data by managing its storage, processing and retrieval over the server. Whereas, integration to server helps your website get an intermediate that builds the communication between database, hardware and the server.

Developers can set up a CMS to help you manage your website pages without code. They will integrate a panel from where you can add or remove content from specific grids or parts of the website layout.

WordPress development services providers utilize PHP as a primary technology for creating back end.

6. Registering Domain Name & Hosting

Domain name is an identification string that helps users recognize the type of your website. What you call you a ‘website name’, is actually its URL that consists of a top domain name at its end. For example; .com,.net, .org, .in, etc.

To make your website accessible over the world wide web, you need to avail hosting services. You need to upload your web pages to the space on the server. Small-scale businesses or individuals can avail shared hosting whereas large-scale companies prefer availing a dedicated server.

Here are some of the most popular domain registration and hosting service providers;

• GoDaddy

• Google Domains

• BlueHost

• Hostinger

• HostGator

It is not necessary to get domain name and hosting prior or later to development. It is all about your efforts. Though, many prefer getting both prior to development.

If you have a valid domain name and hosting prior to development, you can add a coming soon page on the live URL.

7. Testing

Before making the final product out for clients, quality analysts make sure that the website passes the below-mentioned tests;

• Functionality test

• Useability test

• Performance testing

• Cross-browser and cross-device testing

• Security testing

It is recommended to follow an apt testing and maintenance plan even post-development.

8. Launch

Done with design and development?

Have availed SSL domain name (HTTPS) and web hosting services?

Sitemap included?

Testing done?

If yes, you are good to go for launching your website.

Launching is less about efforts and more about carefulness. It is about not missing out on anything that is important.