Website development has become a necessity for all businesses. No matter what business you are in, having a website is more than necessary in today’s time. It is an investment that you make for the betterment of your company and attract more customers to increase sales and profit.

Your company goals and needs are kept in mind by the website developers while designing and developing your website. Here in this article we will look at website development in details.

There are different steps involved in the process of website development starting from gathering data to designing and creating the website. The steps involved are:

Gathering Information and Data

This is the most important step while developing a website as all the other stages are based on this. The needs and requirements of companies vary and developers need of have a thorough understanding of the same. This includes knowing about your business goals and achievements and what plans you have for its future.

The web developer starts by asking you a lot of questions regarding your business and what exactly you are looking for. Certain things to consider in this case are:

• Purpose: What is the purpose of this website and whether you want to promote services, sell products, or simply provide information.
• Goals: What goals you have in mind that you want to accomplish through this website? It can be either sharing information or simply earn revenue or anything else. Make sure that you clear that out with the developers.
• Knowing the target audience: If you have a fixed target audience in mind whom you want to cater, your developer should know that.

Based on this information, the developer would design a sitemap of your website and this would serve as his guide in designing and developing the site.

Design

Having an attractive design that is completely relevant to your purpose is what is required. Keeping in mind the target audience is also important. Like if your target audience are teenagers and young adults, your website should have a quirky design and it needs to have a formal look if it’s a corporate website along with the logo of the company too.

Ideally, web designers will create 3-4 designs and you would have to choose one amongst them. It is really important that you are made a part of the entire process from the start to the end.

Development

This is the phase when the creation of the website starts. It starts with the development of the homepage first and then the developer moves on to the other pages of your website.

A template is created first and then the developer distributes the content in the required way. It is in this step that shopping carts and interactive forums are implemented and also made functional.

Testing and Delivery

After completing your website, the developer will test it and check all the functionalities and everything else, before delivering it you.

Maintenance

Finally, websites need maintenance as the information it has is not static. You might also need to make some changes in future. All these come under maintenance.