A site of any scale requires a competent approach when creating it – whether it is a business card site or a corporate blog of 20 or more pages. The development of a strategy will require material resources, as well as an investment of time and effort.
The Importance of Project Planning
Taking action without preparing a plan is a common decision. However, experts note that, ideally, you need to spend ⅔ of the time on planning a strategy, and ⅓ on implementing this plan. Saving resources at the initial stage leads to fatal mistakes that will set you back, and you will have to redo the work again.
Analytics
Before starting to create a web resource, it is necessary to determine the target audience and analyze the work of competitors – sites that have similar topics and identical target audience. By understanding the needs of his audience, the site owner will be able to adapt it and get his own benefit. To do this, you need to answer the following questions:
- What audience is the site intended for?
- What are the preferences and interests of your potential customers?
- What information might be of interest to them?
- How does your audience usually get this information?
It is also important to study direct competitors: how they solve issues, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of their solutions. Based on the analysis, you can find the best option – highlight your own advantages and strengths that will attract traffic from potential customers.
Strategy
Depending on the specifics of the site, you can achieve such goals as:
- sale of goods and services (for e-commerce);
- customer acquisition;
- product or service presentation;
- information about the company;
- collecting of leads (contact information, applications, etc.);
- building long-term relationships with the client base;
- increasing brand awareness;
- increasing customer loyalty.
One site can pursue several business goals from this list, on the basis of which further steps are formed to create and promote the project.
Creation of terms of reference
The terms of reference prescribe all the basic requirements, capabilities and technical features of the project based on a study of the target audience and competitors. The two previous stages, related to the analysis of the target audience, the business goals themselves and strategy planning, prepare the third stage – the preparation of high-quality TOR, which will be transferred to the development team.
Basic requirements for the terms of reference:
- Finely crafted details. It is necessary to prescribe all the stages of work that the specialist must do.
- Inaccuracies and ambiguous wording (“so that it is beautiful”, “so that it catches”, etc.) are unacceptable. They can lead to significant errors.
- A developer-friendly language. The terms of reference should be completely clear to the specialist so that he does not have to ask or clarify.
Prototyping
To understand how the final product will look like, a prototype is created – a clickable model with a detailed arrangement of elements and navigation.
Convenient site navigation and an intuitive interface are not just words. It is they who guarantee that the user will not leave the resource in 30 seconds without finding the desired section on the site or the answer to his question. All elements on the page are arranged by the designer so that the client can easily find the desired block, section or button.
Create design layouts
The visual component of the site is created at the stage of design development:
- color design;
- form;
- fonts;
- animation.
The customer must provide the designer with a brand or company logo, familiarize with the corporate identity so that the site design is fully consistent with it and is recognizable.
Layout
After the design layout is approved, it is transferred to adaptive layout. Sketches are translated into HTML code and adapted to any device (PC, smartphone, tablet) and any browser.
Frontend and Backend programming
The front-end programmer develops the functionality of the client side of the site, and the back-end deals with the administrative control panel, and also ensures the exchange of information between the “face” and the admin panel.
If the scale of the project allows, then sometimes the stages of layout and programming are combined and performed simultaneously.
Basic website content
To fill the site requires media information and commercial content. To do this, you need to prepare materials in advance. Texts can be prepared by copywriters (the editor must prepare technical specifications for them and prescribe parameters for SEO promotion). It should be important, relevant and valuable information for visitors.
Testing
After the previous steps, you need to test whether the site works as intended. The correct operation of all elements of the site is checked in different browsers and on different devices – desktop, smartphones with different screen resolutions, tablets. If the final testing revealed errors, they are eliminated by the developers.
Technical support
When the project is tested and ready, the development team transfers it to the owner, having taught how to work with the administrative panel. After that, the site owner is ready to independently create pages, place products and publish information content. If bugs appear after the release of the site, the working team is ready to quickly fix them.
