Is your website representing the right face of your business?
Your first impression is your website! Your website is reflecting what truly you are, and this is happening always for all online brands.
In 1 second, each and every second, there are thousands of new websites arrives on the internet, thanks to the bump in the numbers of smartphone users and internet services going on an evolutionary path towards 5G – But yet millions of websites are losing their momentum due to lack of keeping web 2.0 standards, W3C compliances, SEO friendliness and mobile responsive practices.
Web development with the best practices in mind, while planning your web development checklist for your online business, make sure you follow all tips and pre-requirements through the roadmap of its best foot forward.
Do you want to lose your website visitors’ trust? If not, then find the best practices & tips, we as a website development company are discussing here for any professional website.
Table of contents:
Important Factors Affecting Your Website Development Strategy
Determine
the Area of Interest
Understand
your Clients Business Needs
Determine
your Budget
Analyse
Return on Investment
Avail
Efficient Project Management
Leverage
Cost-effective Hosting Infrastructure
Selection
of the Right Web Development Technology
Maintain
Consistent Performance with Web Portal Support
Asses
your Portal Usability
Target
Audience Analysis
Set
an achievable Deadline
Choosing
a right Domain Name
Preparing
the real-time Prototyping
Develop
impactful UI/UX Design
Content
Strategy
Web
Development Standards
Digital
Marketing
Website
Deployment
Important Factors Affecting Your Website Development Strategy
If you’re working on building a new website for your online business or planning to redesign your existing web solutions, there is a website development checklist that you must consider once you have web development requirements on hand.
Let’s have a look at the below-listed checklist for the most influenced elements affecting your web development plan.
Determine the Area of Interest
Firstly, you need to decide the business niche and market drift, which has potentials and can select the one allowing your existing resources, expertise, and knowledge practices. You should find what kind of interested service can make your business more competitive and unique for instance, B2B/B2C services, retail business, and e-commerce platform.
Remember, if you decided to develop your marketplace web portal and successfully determined the business niche, you have to research and study the scope of the domestic and international market as well.
Hire on-demand dedicated developers of desired skill & experience.
Understand your Clients Business Needs
It is also most important that you identify your customers and their needs to come up with unique ways to attract them to your business, products, or services. When it comes to digital interaction especially for online shopping, online education, and b2c marketplace, where your customers are more intense to meet their needs.
The first step toward creating the types of customer digital experiences that really achieve your objectives as happy customers.
Determine your Budget
You can manage the finance effectively as you need to go with perfect budget planning to maintain it successfully. You can start with excellent project execution plans and spend your hard-earned money carefully by designating the perfect agile web development strategy.
To develop a robust Internet presence within the budget threshold, you should come up with effective software development and partnership strategy.
Analyse Return on Investment
Of course, the ROI can be measured in numerous ways depending upon the nature of the portal, let’s say the Electronic Health Record System may have the KPIs to improve efficiency, but a patient portal will be with even more patient engagement. While will for online Education Portal, you need to put some sort of KPIs measure in terms of Hours user engaged on eLearning Portal, which is commonly referred to as an LMS and Learning Management System.
It would help if you always remembered that you are running a portal for earning a maximum profit at the end that realizes and hence develop your revenue models prior.
Avail Efficient Project Management
Across the software industry, numerous start-ups are failed because of poor management. Portal launching planned scrambled depending on how sensibly it is managed, and such project always struggles due to lack of smart project management.
With modern collaborative PMS tools like Slack, Trello, and Asana, you can shape up the execution plan running seamlessly, while lacking such agile process, customer and so your business returns grieve over at the end.
Leverage Cost-effective Hosting Infrastructure
In order to implement and deploy your portal website on the internet world with the most effective and realistic approach, you need to follow the operative infrastructure structure and its guideline. The web hosting and deployment infrastructure including domain, hosting, file storage and CDN caching mechanism that can enable your web platform with solid user engagement and to find your business to keep breathing online 24X7.
This cloud be leveraged by utilizing cloud resources effectively, implement some guidelines with the aim of utilizing each resource of your server infrastructure in an efficient manner. Remember, the next era is of cloud computing. Pay as you go, being a very cost-effective outlook of hosting now.
Selection of the Right Web Development Technology
From open source to proprietary-based enterprise framework, today numerous web programming technologies exist to create distinct web solutions including SAS web platform, Omni-channel web apps, and enterprise web portals.
Enterprises prefer proprietary platforms due to security concerns, while most businesses opt for open source to leverage them. The selection of web development technologies and platforms for your web portal development depends on your web portal’s nature and the requirements of content management.
Maintain Consistent Performance with Web Portal Support
Launching your site is only a single phase of creating a web portal. Your web portal must remain fully functional in the long term. Besides, you need to maintain the seamless performance of your web portal for a better user experience. Thus, update your web portal with the latest version of the web technology, timely edit the contents, images, and information, manage blog posts, and fix any bugs that appear after launch.
Asses your Portal Usability
A bug can make serious damage to your web portal. It affects your website functionality, resulting in significant business loss. Quality checking for every code is the most critical phase of your web portal. You must need to check each code manually as well with automated tools and fix them before launching the site.
There are still plenty of concerns that demand the attention of website owners and even web developers prior to making a start, and during the web development process, but we can discuss here limited technical requirements for building a website, which is highly important to know.
Web development is a complex process while it is passing through multiple disciple points of web designers, web programmers, quality assurance developers, UX designers. Moreover, the advent of the new technologies may give more challenges from the website requirements gathering to deployment on live internet.
Top Technical Tips to Determine While Building a Website
You have to make sure about your website’s reliability and robustness to your stakeholders, that your code is high-performing, scalable, and manageable. Moreover, you also have to seamlessly manage the project during the development process, and therefore we have compiled a below web development technical checklist with top essentials tips you need to consider for your web project.
Target Audience Analysis
Without an appropriate web development strategy, no online business can achieve its target and best ROI. To develop an effective website strategy, you must define website goals and carry audience analysis at a very early stage. You need to analyze how people will be using your website and why with the below research studies.
Demography
Statistical study of user persona on the basis of age, gender, nationality, education, occupation for the B2C audience and for B2B, the criteria such as company size, position, and industry verticals data.
Psychographic
Consumer study based on their behavior and activities including interests, objectives, motivations and opinions.
Marketing behavior
Metrics using historical data of web analytics, saved cookies, browser search history, and other insights.
Web-o-graphics
Web experiences, browser, OS platforms, use frequency, and other useful web preferences data.
Thus, developing a website keeping your user persona in mind may grant you definite success.
Set an achievable Deadline
Designing the website alone can take up a huge chunk of your time if you don’t define a perfect project plan and deadlines. Set daily and weekly sprints for each milestone to avoid being overwhelmed.
Choosing a right Domain Name
The selection of a domain name/URL for your website requires consideration of four perspectives, such as:
Human Perspective
Should be easy to read, speak, and remember.
Brand Perspective
Domain extension depending on the nature of business, county, or business genre. Make it unique to stand out.
SEO Perspective
Should be relevant and containing occasion of your business purpose.
Legal Perspective
Consider copyright and trademark issues.
Preparing the real-time Prototyping
Wireframe development and prototype designing are significant steps before reaching the final design acceptance in the web development process. Advanced technologies for prototyping tools, which provide interactive screen mock-ups with real-time web surfing experience and allow pointing devices to touch gestures and mobile operations. Prototype portrays content navigation through the hierarchy structure.
Prototyping is an iterative process, so you have to limit the number of iteration considering design options and affordability in the sense of effort, time, and resources spent on the prototype design process.
Develop impactful UI/UX Design
After approval of prototypes, UI/UX designers take the step by transforming your prototypes into meaningful and impactful illustrations where low-fidelity and high-fidelity design mock-up being developed.
Meet, communicate, and interact with each other within the stakeholders, design and development team, behaving as an individual user persona of your target audience. Such interaction creates an immense web experience for the real world visitors as close as it can conceivably be.
Designing excellent user experiences requires brilliant UX designers who can think of different perspectives to solve UX problems. The following guidelines may help your website UX developers deliver stunning outcomes:
Audience Expectations
Know the expectations of your targeted audience and find out what interface may work for them. The interface on your website should be meaningful to users, take surveys on each stage of web development and run user experience tests.
Keep it Simple
Keep things simple to avoid distractions and try to bring consistency in web design. Implement a visual hierarchy for highlighting the most important elements first and less afterward.
A good Typography
Select fonts carefully, headers tag as per the rank of their levels right from H1 to H6. Colour is a respected element in establishing relationships and hold the attention of onlookers.
Advanced Navigation
Employ navigation plans according to behavior glooms of your website, and keep navigation menu, breadcrumb, and on-site search outcome more simple, concise and interactive.
Optimized Graphics
Optimize images and graphics elements for quick loading without conceding with quality. Leverage different sizes and resolutions that meet requirements for responsive web design on cross platforms.
Smart UI Elements
Use smart UI elements on each page by the best practices of efficient Call Actions, Read More, Add to Cart buttons and those motivate the users further in their journey.
Content Strategy
Content is king so web development can’t ignore them while designing a successful website. There should have clear and effective information architecture & content layouts focusing on critical matters. Grouping relevant content help visitors to scan it rapidly who makes content unique and relevant, keeps the target audience in mind.
Planning for website content strategy has never been easier, you need to build your content marketing strategy that aligns with trending topics, visitor anticipation, that drives maximum digital experience from your landing pages. Your site content is a vital instrument in helping achieve your marketing goals. Your content strategy will motivate your audience to visit your site, hence you should have a solid consumer-centric content strategy in place.
Website Usability
Content stability is forming the basis for great user experiences on your website. Usability needs a user-centric design, therefore should meet the user goals and rational models that make a website easy to use.
Website Readability
Your content readability measures how easily your visitor interacts with your website. A best readable content strategy hooks the audience by keeping visitor intent in mind, optimum words, motivation to take action on CTA elements.
Website Features & Functionality
Websites without salient features hardly work with user expectations. Your website should be dynamic, interactive, and should update content in real-time.
Web Development Standards
The international standards for web application development that has the unmatched potential to enable web developers to build rich interactive web experiences. W3C is the institute that developed the technical guidelines for a standard web design and development process to amplify harmony for reliability and quality.
If you are learning about Web Development Standards, you may wish to look into the following detail:
Web Coding Standard
Making clear and manageable code at the programming crucial stage of website development. There are several best coding standards that shall be considered including code reusability, avoid hard-coding, scalable coding, and keep code testing and keeping auto-correction.
Page Loading Speed
Google loves blistering fast websites and gives a ranking. People are impatient by nature and don’t like waiting much so leave websites to take more than three seconds to load despite the display of loading animations. There apply image optimization, keep progressive loading in the background, avoid inline JavaScript and CSS, minify the HTML code and finally use caching technic to boost up your website loading.
Compatibility
Today mobile browsers are used approvingly so check your mobile-friendly website, should be responsive for all major browsers and OS.
Security Benchmarks
Following universal security standards and obtaining the latest encryption technologies for your website security are required steps towards offering safe and secure web experiences.
Digital Marketing
A great digital marketing strategy defines the path for online business success, and it is feasible only if your website has search engine optimization and having good search engine rankings. You need to make a perfect digital marketing plan into consideration with all fundamental principles to develop and market your web content and need to develop vital digital marketing strategies by considering all other effective aspects as below:
Search Engine Marketing
As a web designer, you need to deal with when SEO best practices in your mind while building it. You need to take care of SEO-friendly URLs, Meta and Header that should contain primary business keywords, and should follow the true link-building practices and should follow a genuine and organic SEO plan.
Social Media Marketing
Social media rewards high in ranking and following the best SMO practices may help you a lot with social networking site integration and bookmarking.
Client Reviews
Google and other search engines are prioritizing ratings and reviews in their ranking algorithms. Therefore, making provisions to obtaining honest ratings and reviews makes great sense in Internet marketing and trust-building efforts. Google, Yelp, Schema.org offers to code to highlight your web page ratings and reviews in SERPs.
Sitemap Creation
A sitemap is a summary of the entire site and helps bots and users to find all web pages in a place. Keep a copy of XML sitemap updated using the latest sitemap plugins, which are doing automatic updates of pages/links.
Track Performance
Just making the website is not enough. You need to understand how your website is performing, who and how are users coming to your website. Integrate Google Analytics or Mixpanel kind of free or paid search engine analytics tools, it’s great to monitor the site performance, traffic, behavior of visitors, and other useful data for re-marketing.
CTA Strategies
Effective CTA design is a vital element to accomplish your visitors’ goals throughout the lead generation process. While designing CTA, you need to keep Inquiry Form, Call & Contact Button, Product & Service Navigation, Social Sharing Icons, and other converting “Call To Action” elements’ design, size and color in mind.
User Onboarding
Educate your visitors and leads them to achieve the goals of both users and websites. Use a variety of engagement techniques to guide your users through the website journey such as tips on the cursor, hover pop-up, interactive modules, off-canvas notifications, and so many others.
Website Deployment
Without the right deployment roadmap, you cannot publish your website on the Internet and run it successfully on time. Website hosting involves keeping your web application streamline between pre-production and development servers concurrently. You should minimize your risk by using a separate production server for a various stages of deployments, such as development, testing, pre-production and production.
Selection of Hosting Provider
Website speed is an important factor in search engine ranking. Hosting services have greater impacts on loading performance. Besides these, hosting influencing many other website success factors. Therefore, the selection of web hosts is crucial, and only your web developers can offer the right technical help to show a way to cut through hosting jargon and allow you to make an informed decision.
Maintenance Plan
Proper maintenance of your website allows it to provide services in the long run and increase ROI. To ease the maintenance process, your website code should be comprehensive and clear so any level of a skilled developer can attain it.
Monitor Changes & Updates
Proper monitoring is needed once your new website is live for real-time operations. It’s important to keep watching whether everything works as intended. There are probabilities to arise so many updates and change requests even users encounter bugs, errors and issues. A good tip for keep health checking for your website releases, updates and you’re your development resources ready in case something needs to be fixed instantly.
Hire dedicated team for your next web development project.
Conclusion
There are tons of factors influencing website success related to web design and the web development process. Therefore, the given list and tips may prove useful for website owners and website developers. So, the article may be the most influencing landfill to follow before going for online business and during the web developing process. These suggestions may help you to create your own website without all possible hurdles and over expenses.
Moreover, everybody is looking for a trustworthy web development company with a solid portfolio and adequate infrastructural facilities to foster creativity and collaboration to work on high-end web development projects from offshore clients. Based on the above aspects, you need to select the right Website Development Partner straightaway and you should not put your website’s success at risk – check out our web development services at Perception System and start building today with our free, fun, and easy-to-understand website requirements checklist!
