The Website Process



1. Deciding That You Want A Website

Maybe your small business is swamped with questions that could be answered by a website. Perhaps you want to easily reach out to a wider audience. Possibly you have decided to showcase yourself, or your products or services. Whatever the case may be, now is the time to jot down what you think your website should be and do.

2. Finding A Good Developer

Go to Google (if that is not how you got here). Type in "web developer yourcity", and look through the results. Alternatively, you can also look through a phone book or classifieds listings, but most serious developers will have their own website.

Make sure to take note of a few things about your selections:


3. The First Meeting

Once you have selected a developer (or a few), and contacted them to set a time, it's time for the first meeting. This is where you get to sit down with (or phone) your potential developer(s) and discuss your website.

Things to mention:


Questions to ask:


4. Design

Most developers will have a team of people that they work with to have a design created. However, if you want, you can always locate your own designer and work with them to have a site design created for your developer.

The designer will work out some specifications with you, and then start creating a look for your website. Selecting a color scheme (based off your logo, or working from a color that you have provided), the designer sketches out a look for your website, including where elements such as navigation and content will be placed. The designer will create an image for your layout, and style it with the colors, and typography that will make your site look unique, as well as being easy to use.

After a draft or two, the design will be passed back to you for a first review. This is where you will get the chance to change any colors or elements that you do not like. After this review, the designer will go over the design, modifying it to fit your critique. Usually there will be a few more exchanges like this, until you are satisfied with the base look of your website.

5. Development

Once you have a finalized look for your website (or maybe while the look was being created), development starts. The developer will start creating the code that will support the functionality you have asked for, building out the various pieces of your website to your specs.

Usually, the developer will also handle taking the image that was produced by the designer and turning it into a functional piece of code (HTML and CSS are the languages used to accomplish this). The developer slices out any images that are needed, and boils the layout down into pieces to wrap around the navigation and content code that he is building. It is during this process that some layout elements may also be cut, due to technical limitations that do not allow them to be properly created.

6. Testing and Polish

At this stage of the website process, you will start to see an increase in the amount of communication you exchange with your developer. You will get a chance to run through your new website as it nears completion, and ask for any modifications to any piece of the website you want.

During this part of the work, the developer will also be squashing bugs in the code that you or he may be encountering. Also, he will be cleaning up any code he has created, making it smaller and more efficient, and preparing it to be launched.

7. Website Launch

Finally, you have reached the most important step in the work. The developer will seek your approval of the website, and incorporate any final changes you want to make. Once everything is working to your and their satisfaction, the developer will upload your website to your live server, and complete any work needed to set up the website in it's new home.

8. Project Completion

Once your website is live and running at www.yourcompanyaddress.com, the developer will wrap up any email and documentation that you had requested, as well as detailing to you how to access and use your website (if needed).

9. End ?!

While this may be the end of the project, this is not the end of your relationship with the developer. Your website is live and working now, but you will usually want to have a maintenance contract put together with the developer.

Everything works fine, but eventually you will want to make tweaks, or perhaps entirely new versions of some of the scripts or code that is used in your site may become available. With the maintenance in place, your developer should check up on your site at least twice a year to make sure that everything is working well, and this will be the oppertunity for him or you to bring up small tweaks that need to be made to keep everything running well.