My website design & development process

Information Gathering

Purpose

What is the purpose of your website? I will need to know what your website’s purpose is whether it is to sell items, blog or showcase portfolio items.

Goals

What do you want to achieve from having a website?

Target Audience

Who will your website be targeted towards? Will the website be business to business or business to customer? Who would your business avatar be?

Content

What content will you post on your website? It’s good to get an idea of what information you will want to display on your website. Having content ready will help me layout pages within the planning stage.

Planning

Sitemap 

What pages will you need on your website? It’s ideal to create a sitemap to list all the main areas of the website and develop a consistent navigation.

Content management system (CMS)

Do you need to regularly edit and update content?

If yes it’s best if you have a CMS to easily update images and text. I recommend WordPress as it is easily updatable with a wide array of plugins to increase the functionality of your website.

Wireframes 

Once all of the initial content and pages have been decided for your website, wireframes can be created to outline where content will be positioned to maximise user interaction. This can be as simple as a sketch of boxes to a working interface showing the users experience and testing layouts within app designs.

Websites you like 

Collect links to websites you like the look of or features within them that you would like on your website. This will allow me to gauge what styles would suit your website and what functionality would be required.

Website Design

Information gathered from the planning stage is now used to begin designing your new website.

Influences from your preferences, branding and websites you like are now used to create pages within your sitemap and wireframes. Consistency between pages is key to having a well designed website.

Once the designs have been approved the website development and coding can begin.

Website Development

The development begins with the finalised website design images separated out and optimised for the web. The designs are then converted into responsive HTML pages styled with CSS. I optimise all website content to increase Google search engine ranking.

Interactions are then added with JavaScript to bring the site to life. This can include hover states for links, image sliders or parallax content.

Content management systems can be integrated at this stage to allow the edibility of content.

Testing and Delivery

Towards the end of website development the website is rigorously tested for bugs within different web browsers, screen sizes and devices to make sure the website works correctly for all users.

Final content and imagery is now added to bring the website to life.

Once the website is tested and optimised it is now ready to be put live. This is where the development site is moved to the live server so the public can see it.

Maintenance

This stage is often forgotten about until something goes wrong or if you want to update the design of your website.

WordPress often has updates for plugins and it’s core code. These can be automatically downloaded within the websites dashboard. Updating can sometimes break sections of the website, it may be best to contact your web developer to ask if it is necessary to perform updates.