7 Key Phases to Develop a New Website from Scratch Successfully

One of the old sayings is if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. 

Developing a website without a plan is like creating a high-commercial building without a map. In order to succeed, both projects need solid structure and planning.

Developing a website requires a map similar to a property.

And this map is composed of seven phases.

Without further ado, here’s your step by step guide to draft a blueprint to develop a new website from scratch.

Phase 1. Collect and Learn

The very first phase in developing a new site is to collect relevant raw data that would be beneficial for your website.

You can do this by analyzing your competitor websites and by receiving feedback from business peers and colleagues.

Most of the companies appoint professional web design and development company to develop your website. Even I recommend you to go with competent Web Development Company, as functionality and look of your site can shape or destroy your business.

So, be ready to acknowledge relevant inquiries as these responses are mandatory to design a formative brief.

These questions will assist development company to build a website as per your needs.

Let’s get started with these questions:

#1 Purpose:

Q: What is the purpose of my website?

Q: Am I a product based or service based company?

#2 Goals:

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by developing this website like either do you want to make money or share worthy content?

#3 Target Audience:

Q: Who would be my target audience?

Q: Which demographics groups do they belong to?

Q: How will your website or business impact their lives?

#4 Content:

Q: What kind of knowledge will your end user be looking for?

Q: Are they looking for an informative blog, a distinct product or online ordering?

Phase 2: Planning

The data you collect in phase 1 will hugely help you to how to strategize for your website. Steps to be taken are:

#1 Creating a Sitemap:

List of all main topic areas of the site, as well as subtopics to develop a consistent, easy to understand navigational system.

#2 Determining What technologies you require:

Decide what technologies you want to choose from any CMS, PHP,  ASP.Net, flash applications, interactive forms and many more.

#3 Go for Responsive Designs:

As smartphones enactment are rising day by day, so do you want to consider responsive design or not?

#4 Designing mockups:

Spend time designing out pages via wireframes. This will enable you to imagine the design and provide you a superficial structure of your site.

#5 Plan your Content:

Determining what content to place on your site is very mandatory for overall site success. Content not only covers the drafted copy but pictures, graphs, or pdf files as well.

#6 Prepare for search engines:

Getting your website to rank on Google; it is one of the most relevant ways to get traffic to your site. So it’s mandatory to put your shoes in Search Engine Optimization in planning phase only. Within digital marketing, SEO is an art in its own way, and its essential parts are:

a. Keyword Research

b. Meta Tags

c. ALT Text

d. Link Building

Tip: Keep in mind that SEO is not short-term process and doesn’t stop once the website is begun. You will require proceeding to polish it as you go along in order to win possible results.

Phase 3: Design

If you’ve rolled out the details in in Phase 1 and 2, then creating the home page and all following sub-pages should be simple. For example, by knowing your demographics, you can efficiently use the appropriate design elements and applications.

Seeing layouts with real content and photos, accompanying with logo and colors will surely bring your vision of the site to life. If you’re working with professional Web Design Company, they will give you mockups in several development phases for your feedback. As doing changes after the development is hard and costly too. So practice this time carefully.

Phase 4: Development

Once the design part is finished and approved, the website comes in the development phase. The developer will take all the individual graphic elements from the mockups and employ them to build an operative webpage. Shopping carts, contact forms, etc. will be executed in this phase only.

Phase 5: Testing, Delivery & Launch

The quality assurance team will test your website from complete functionality to compatibility issues. Also, Q/A team will examine whether the written code is matching the current web standards or not.

Once the last approval is given, website files will be uploaded to hosting server, and it will be launched to live.

Phase 6: Marketing

Your new website has been launched, and now it is the time to market your site. Announce the good news to your network via your social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, etc.

Send the newsletters to your existing customers about your new website or products. This phase also helps you to strengthen your SEO foundation.

Phase 7: Post Launch

Although, your website has launched. It’s equally as essential to maintaining your site post-launch. A website is an active entity and it remains even after the developer has completed his work.

What happens when something crashes on your website? Or outbound links on your site has been broken? What if you want to refresh any content? You need to outline all of this and advise you to hold control over all of the admin accounts.