They say it right — the first impression is the last. Speaking of which, the quality of design highly dictates the success of your website and leaves an everlasting impression. Web visitors should be fascinated with the design, or else they are sure to bounce back. Therefore, the web design and development stages are the two most important phases in the entire development process. Website development not only helps you create an online presence but also increases your brand value and enhances the image.
Having said that, every web development project and web developer has to go through different steps to see the website to fruition. Even though the steps involved in the web development process may differ, the core processes stay the same. There are so many web designing and development services that are doing things the old way — but some are automating with the changing trends.
Speaking of which, as the technology continues to evolve, developers are finding newer and productive ways to innovate websites. They are discovering new technologies to stay one step ahead of their competition and to ensure success.
Modern ways of web development are facilitating web designing and development services to deliver faster yet quality products for their global clientele base. In this blog, I will share some of the modern website development trends to keep in mind before you start developing software products.
Lightweight Web Applications
Yes, lightweight web apps are the real thing such as single-page website development. They are dynamic, plus you can showcase everything about your product or service through a single page. Also, the more the number of web pages, the higher the website size — and higher size slows down the speed — be it a mobile application or a website. Also, your website should load in as little as 3 seconds — because longer loading times tend to frustrate web visitors as a result making you lose your potential buyers before they can even convert to full-time paying customers. So single-page websites are the new trend — if you are a startup, single-page web apps are quite beneficial both in terms of development time and cost. You can add more pages in the future only unless you need to.
Full-Stack Development
The Google searches on full-stack development increased remarkably from the year 2012. Many web designing and development services started to incorporate full-stack development into their web projects. Now, what does full-stack development mean? Full-stack development is the development of both the front end and the back end. The best part is that full-stack developers can work on both including databases and debugging web applications. They are all-rounders. No need to hire people for front or back-end development separately when you can hire full-stack developers.
Cross-Platform Development
No matter what — cross-platform development will never ever become obsolete. Because now more and more people are using mobile applications, therefore, the web app should be highly responsive and can be used through different platforms. Moreover, the cross-platform allows developers to work with a single code base, which is very time-saving. Because it eliminates repetitive tasks and as a result speeds up the development life-cycle. Consult any web designing and development services and they would also recommend going with the cross-platform development moving forward.
Recommended: What factors to consider when you hire a web development company for your business
Modern Web Development Process
Step 1: Gather All the Necessary Requirements
Even though this may sound like the old way of developing websites — but either new or old, you simply can not work without knowing what is that your clients are looking for or what kind of product you need, what are the functionalities, and features, what will be the project management strategy and tools that you will be using — All of these things are decided during the requirements gathering stage and hence it is very important. You should gather as much information as possible from the very beginning, before starting your development process so that you don’t face confusion or misunderstandings down the road.
Step 2: Valuable Content Curation
You can not leave your website empty, you need to ensure that your site is filled with only meaningful information. Start curating content for the home page to all internal pages. After the content is finalized, it will become easier for the UI/UX team to come up with the design, and also it will become easier for them to know which content should be placed where. Plus prototyping becomes easier too.
Step 3: Website Design and Prototyping
Some web designing and development services find it easier to curate content before designing but some like to design the layout before working on content. I personally prefer the former. But then again it’s all about personal preference. When designing you make sure of everything including consistency across multiple web pages. Use of the same fonts, color, design elements, imagery is very important. It’s recommended that you come up with a design guide before you start the design process so everyone is aware of the direction. After designing the prototypes, prototyping is important so that the developers know how every functionality works. They can use the prototypes to help with coding. Invision is one of the most popular apps used for prototyping by the website design and development services.
Step 4: Website Development — Front End
This step is considered one of the creative steps in the entire web development process. Programming or coding the web app can take 4 weeks to somewhere around 8 — it all depends on the complexity. It’s obvious, if you want to add animations and all sorts of glitter on your website, it will take time. If you’re developing a single-page site, it might take a few weeks only. The project manager gathers all the requirements and all the assets from the design team and hands it over to the lead developer, the lead developer in return delegates the tasks and makes sure that every member of his team is well aware of their tasks at hand. When lead developer gives a green signal that development has been done, the website is then passed to testing department.
Step 5: Testing and Launch
The tester has to identify bugs in the website – after running a thorough check. The testing team then develops a report based on the findings and sends it to the development team to review and fix the issues. After feedback from all the major stakeholders, the app is finally scheduled for deployment and initial launch.
