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You’ve decided that it’s time for your business to create a website. Well, what’s so difficult? It’s necessary to find a development team, describe all the wishes, sometimes visit meetings to control the development, and get the ready-made resource in a couple of months. But it’s not that simple.
Check our checklist for creating a website from A to Z, so that you don’t miss anything.
- Define a clear purpose of the site
As a rule, most customers think over a design and unusual functionality in advance, so that users are stunned. But believe us, these are factors of secondary importance. First, formulate the specific objectives of the site. This is a necessary foundation, without which neither full-screen animation nor futuristic design will help.
After you find out what problem your Internet resource should solve, write down a series of tasks – how it will do it. This will make you understand what kind of site you need: an online store, a web business card, a landing page, and so on.
- Who is your target audience? Who are your competitors?
When the goals and objectives are clear, it’s time to study the key audience. Who is interested in your services or products? What problem does your product solve? What kind of communication does your target audience prefer?
Now research your competitors. Find flaws in the presentation of their product on the Internet and transform it to your advantage.
- Choose the technical basis of the site
- Hosting
This is a site on the server where your Internet resource will be located. Reliable hosting will ensure the smooth and fast operation of the site.
- CMS
The choice of the engine that will power the entire project is an important stage since the future functionality of the site depends on this management system. Therefore, choose a CMS depending on the type of Internet resource that you have already defined earlier.
For corporate and business card sites, WordPress, MODX, Drupal are best suited.
For online stores and landing pages, choose Joomla, OpenCart, Shop-Script, and so on.
- Domain
This is what you enter into the address bar of the browser. The domain name plays a big role both for the representation on the Internet and for SEO. Let the site be called simply, clearly and convey the specifics and values of your business.
- Site structure
The structure determines the location and relationship of elements of an online resource: sections, subsections, pages. So this is one of the crucial steps.
It’s better to contact a good UI/UX designer so that in the future you don’t have to redo the site several times.
- Site functionality
It’s time to think about a set of options for your Internet resource. Start with the basic functionality that any website should have. Then you can fantasize about a unique, unusual, interesting toolkit. Build a website based on the needs of your target audience.
- Design
Remember that if you like a design, this doesn’t mean that the target audience will also like it. Therefore, when choosing colors, fonts, drawing buttons, menus, and other elements, you need to focus on your consumer tastes and trends that set the tone for the market.
- SEO design
Warning! Don’t ever postpone this step. SEO must be implemented at the stage of website development. This is necessary for your Internet resource to have a high search potential immediately after launch. This will save you time and bring profit faster.
SEO design at the development stage includes marketing analysis, collection of the semantic core, optimization of the site structure. In general, as soon as you decide to create a website, hire a SEO specialist and everything will be fine.
- Prototyping and feedback
Now you need to see how the site will look and make edits even before the actual development of the Internet resource. According to Qulix – front end development company, this stage is of paramount importance as it helps to achieve your goal more quickly: it is much easier, cheaper, and faster to implement fixes at the prototyping stage than to recast the finished product.
In addition to evaluating the prototype, the focus group should interact with it. This will give you feedback from your target audience and can improve your site during development. So take this step seriously.
- Layout and adaptation for mobile devices
As you checked and corrected everything, you can translate the prototype into HTML pages and add the planned functionality. And it’s crucial to ensure adaptability so that the site is displayed correctly and works on different devices: computer, smartphone, tablet.
The desire to use your resource depends on this.
- Testing, verification, launch
It remains to test the site and you can launch it. Before launching, all main functions should work without bugs, pages should be displayed in all popular browsers, download speed should not exceed 2 seconds, spam blocking should work. The list of things that should work is endless, but it can be replaced with one word – everything.
All this can be entrusted to a professional tester.
- Site support
After the project is rolled out, you can order support. The site will require planned changes and implementations, bug fixes, and the addition of new functionality. Therefore, it’s better to delegate this to specialists. Actually, like the whole development of the site. Experts know exactly what steps must be taken when developing a cool modern product. Check the best web design companies to find your dream team.
Final thoughts
The end of development is just the beginning of the site’s life path. For people to know about it somehow, the site must become noticeable. The first and fastest option is contextual advertising. The second is social media promotion.
But even when the number of visitors begins to grow steadily, it is necessary to closely monitor their behavior on the site, analyze their actions, find out the reason for the churn of visitors and increase the level of user engagement. This is why it is necessary to constantly test ideas and create a working marketing strategy based on them.
As you can see, even after the finished site is rolled out, all the fun is just beginning!
