The Web Site Development Process

If you are interested in having a web site developed for your business or in getting an existing site updated, these comments will help you get ready for the process and offer guidelines for selecting the right web designer for your needs.

What is the website development process?

At a high level it consists of these steps:

1. You specify your goals and requirements to a web designer.
2. The designer designs a website that satisfies your requirements and can help achieve your goals.
3. You sign off on the design.
4. The designer then develops the website and populates it with the information you provide.
5. The site is launched and registered with search engines and directories.
6. You monitor the impact of the site on your business and measure its success based on criteria you had previously set out to the designer.

If this is the process at a high level, how do you prepare for it so that you enter it with the right information and enough information to succeed? Here’s how.

Preparing for the creation of your website

Before engaging a website designer, you need to take a few steps to ensure that that engagement will be a success. It is important that you do this yourself, and that you do not rely on the designer to do it for you or to prod you into doing this, because - generally speaking - he won’t. Most web designers are designers, with little insight into business.

• Determine the business goals of the website. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do. So before talking to a designer, you need to understand how your website will fit into your business strategy – how does it support and promote the goals of your business? There are a lot of choices in getting a website created: knowing your goals will help you make the right choices.

• Determine how you will measure the success of your website, and over what timeframe. If you will be measuring success based on how much revenue is generated via the website, you must have a way of knowing how much revenue each business channel contributes. It could be that a customer who walks through the door and buys a product did so because she/he learned about your business through your website. How will you know this? You might find that you need to put in place new business processes or modify existing ones to ensure you measure the impact. Because businesses, especially small businesses, have difficulty understanding and measuring the success of their channels, they will tend to rely on technical measures of a website’s success (such as number of unique visitors per month), unless of course products are sold directly online via the website.

• Get your information together. Following these few simple steps will help you determine the organization of your website, the likely size of the site, and - most usefully - the important pieces of information that are missing.
  1. Assemble all of the information you have on your business, your products and your services – the information that will benefit your customers. This can be in the form of business documents such as mission statement or a statement of customer commitment, a history of your business, product brochures (yours and the vendors), advertisements, product specifications, lists of products and/or services, documents of certification and awards – anything that helps describe your business and what you offer customers.
  2. Now group the documents by general subject area. Reasonable categories are the business itself, products, services, and client support. Now take each group and break it down into sub-groups. For example, Products might break into product type (eg, indoor products, outdoor products) descriptions (brochures and the like), and specifications (technical descriptions). This breakdown will help you understand what information you will have on the site - not all of it will go on the site, of course, but this gives you the basis for selection. And it will help you determine what additional information needs to be documented. For example, you might find that there is not much documented information about your business itself - and this process will tell you what you need to create. This information becomes the basis of the designers information map.
  3. Assemble photographs, logos and other graphic elements that support your products or suite of services. This process will tell you whether or not you presently have enough graphic material or whether you need a professional photographer to provide more. If you find that there is little consistency in the way your business and/or products are graphically presented, it is likely that you need to rethink your business image. Perhaps you need a graphic makeover - a new logo, new colors, consistent presentation of your business in graphic form. Consistency of graphic presentation is crucial in establishing your brand identity.
  
  The outcome of your work on this point will provide you with information that will better clarify the overall cost.

• Look at competitor websites. Understand how your competition is using the Internet to promote its business goals - what image do they strive for, how do they present themselves, and what sort of information, products and services do they present to current and prospective customers.

• List the websites that you like. Make a list of websites that you would like your website to emulate. They don’t have to be competing sites or even in the same line of business. Show the sites to your web designer so that he/she will know what sort of look you would like to achieve in your website.

• Understand your expected audience. Create a profile of the typical viewer of your website - their age, familiarity with the Internet, annual income, etc. This information will be useful to the website designer in fashioning a site that is attuned to the experience and capability of a typical viewer.

• Cost commitment. Get from your web designer a cost commitment to a specific cost or cost range, and - most important - understand the parameters that effect cost. Understand what sort of changes/tweaking are included and which will drive the cost up.

• Warranty. Like most other products, websites can have defects. And like most other products they should have a warranty period during which problems are fixed free of charge. Warranties will range from a week to a month, depending on the size and complexity of the website.

• Get more than one price quote. Get price quotes from a couple of different web developers. Understand what services are included in each of the price quotes. The basic components of cost will be: domain registration (an ongoing cost usually paid annually), hosting your website (an ongoing cost paid monthly or annually), website design and development (one-time cost), and maintenance (an ongoing cost).

Maintenance costs vary considerably from designer to designer. Sometimes maintenance is charged at an hourly rate, sometimes with an annual minimum, sometimes not. Some developers charge a monthly fee for maintenance, whether you request changes or not. It is important to understand what you get for your maintenance dollar.

• Find out if you get statistics on the popularity of the site, so that you can improve it and provide better information to your viewers.

• Understand the process. Quiz the developers on the process they go through in designing and developing your website. Ask for a clear schedule of events leading to the completion of your website, and make sure that you understand your role in expediting the work. A website is, in a sense, a digital container for your business: the web designer can build the container, but cannot complete the website without your contribution of the business information that fills the website.

What to expect from your website designer/developer

Here's what you have the right to expect during the Design Phase:

• A Site Map. This is a printed outline of the content and major subject areas of your website. It should include all of the information you described as being on your site, and it should provide a high-level description of the way a site visitor would navigate through the information. The categories, organization, and means of navigation should be easily understandable - if you don't get it, your site's visitors certainly won't.

• A mock-up design. The designer should produce a mock-up of your home page and one other page that is a typical representative of a “content” page. The mock-up will probably not be a working web page; it is more likely to be a picture of a web page, but it will use the photos, graphic images, logo, and colors that constitute the web page.

• A clean design. You should ensure that the design
  • Is clean and attractive
  • Uses colors and images that are in tune with your products and services
  • Encorporates your logo and business motto/slogan
  • Has no “distractions” – no garish blocks of color, no gimmicky animations and the like that can distract the site visitor from your message
  • Presents an easily understood message
  • Is easy to navigate
  • Simplifies the process of finding information. A website should enhance and speed the process of finding your business information, it should not inhibit or stand in the way of clarity of product and vision
    
• Feedback. The designer should incorporate your feedback on the mock-up into the next iteration and the actual website when it is built.

When looking at the website design keep in mind your other marketing materials – advertisements, brochures, signature image, colors, logo, slogan. These all must be consistent and mutually supportive in helping to define your identity.

What to expect during the Development Phase:

• You should expect frequent updates on the progress of developing your site. You should be given a heads-up if there are problems or expected delays.

• The developer should be clear on what he needs from you to complete his work.

• The developer should implement the design that you he presented you with, and it should not be different in significant ways.

• The design is tested - links work, rollover effects behave as expected, etc.

• The developer should register the site with search engines and directories. These should include at a minimum Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and The Open Directory.

• You should expect your website to be tested with and look the same in a number of browsers. Based on current market share your site should be tested in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.