Your website is the face of your business and company but building a good website isn’t so easy. Websites are made with different styles, different purposes, different programming languages but the soul of a good website is its design and content. There are many websites with good content, but the design is poor. Viewers get attracted with web design but they get disappointed after scrolling through the content of the website. Also, a site with good design needs maintenance and timely updates. Web development isn’t about implementing the codes on a website, but is a combined process of web design, Content management system (CMS) and coding. In this blog we are going to discuss 7 simple stages of Website development Cycle 1. Gather and analyze information As we said earlier, a website should be a mirror image of your business and act as second hand for you. So to start the development process, you should gather and analyze all the information about your idea. Define your goal- Are you in the service sector or product selling category, informative website or certain segment specific. Define your business motive- Want to sell product/service, want to display products and increase online visibility or want to get an enquiry from customer. 2. Planning and SRS Hire a trusted Web development company and have a face to face meeting to discuss all your flow and requirements. Present all the input collected in step 1 and get a detailed SRS(specific requirement specification) that gives a rough architecture of your website. This will act as a wireframe that provides a visual description of a site. Other than that, decide what functions and features you want in your site. This function includes login, email subscription, admin function, live chat, payment gateway, social media integration, voice recognition facility, Artificial Intelligence and much more. 3. Website Design Website Design is the most crucial step of the process as it requires your combination and designers skill. You have to decide what your website will look like. Where should be placements of important icons and tabs. Unique design attracts attention of customers but it should be user friendly and designed as per target audience. Other things to keep in mind are website theme, colour combination, placement of text, images, videos, etc. Your web designer will create one or more prototype designs for your web site. This is typically a .jpg image of what the final design will look like. At this stage communication and approval will play an important role to ensure the final website will match your needs and wishes. Involvement with your web designer throughout the web development process gives you the opportunity to express your likes and dislikes on the site design. 4. Development At this stage developers will run the codes on your dream project to give it a live shape. Most of the time, the landing or main page is created first, and then all other web pages are added, as per the site hierarchy created as mentioned in the sitemap. On the technical front, a successful web site requires an understanding of front-end web development. This involves writing valid HTML / CSS code that compiles to current web standards, maximizing functionality, as well as accessibility for as large an audience as possible. 5. Content Management Give your audience or visitor a nice connectivity with appropriate content. Their search should get a result on landing your web pages. The content should be modified for the website with headings, subheadings, tags, etc. so that people can find what they are searching. The digital world demands a new concept of content management that is SEO optimized. If you go for this at the time of development, your website can rank in good SERPs. 6. Testing and Launch Check functionality of the website simultaneously with tester and designer so that you can get fixed small errors at the same time. Must check compatibility issues (responsive on all browsers and platforms), mobile readable fonts, Favicons and image clearity. Your website should have proper URLs and titles or each page. Once you give your web designer final approval, it is time to deliver the site. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program is used to upload the web site files to your server. You must have booked a unique domain name for your website and now the time comes to host your website on a server. If you are going to run an e-commerce website where heavy traffic can generate, then must opt for powerful and more secured servers. You can go for shared web hosting for less traffic or just informative website. Once these accounts have been setup, and your web site uploaded to the server, the site should be put through one last run-through. This is just precautionary, to confirm that all files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site continues to be fully functional. Now this is the time for the launch of your website. 7. Maintenance The development of your web site is not necessarily over, though. One way to bring repeat visitors to your site is to offer new content or products on a regular basis. Most web development company will be more than happy to continue working together with you, to update the information on your web site. You must take a website maintenance package to add on regular update or some changes you thought at some point.