Web Development Process: How Does Change Happen?

Why Understanding the Web Development Process is Crucial

The landscape of web development is ever-changing, with over 1.94 billion websites worldwide and approximately 543,000 new ones emerging daily. Keeping pace with this evolution is crucial.

In 2024, numerous trends are reshaping website development. From Blockchain Technology integration to Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Internet of Things (IoT) utilization, these trends redefine the process.

The web development industry is on a trajectory of 8.08% annual growth, fueled by emerging tech and evolving user preferences. Adaptability and accessibility are key to enhancing user experiences: and understanding the web development crucial in this sense.

1. Clarity of Vision

Navigating the web development process is akin to having a detailed roadmap for a complex journey. It offers a clear trajectory from project inception to final delivery, aiding stakeholders in envisioning the path ahead, preparing for obstacles, and ensuring success.

Take, for example, the overhaul of a major e-commerce platform. The web development process guided the team through stages like planning, design, development, testing, and deployment, aligning with goals of enhancing user experience and boosting sales. By understanding this journey, stakeholders could foresee challenges, such as the necessity for extensive UX testing, and plan accordingly.

In summary, comprehending the web development process is not just advantageous but imperative for the successful execution of any web project. It offers a clear vision, empowering stakeholders to traverse from concept to completion with confidence.

2. Effective Planning

Understanding the web development process is crucial as it enables effective project planning. By knowing the stages and milestones, businesses can set realistic timelines and allocate resources efficiently. This process has evolved significantly over the years, adapting to new technologies and user preferences.

For instance, the development of a web application typically involves client-side development (creating the user interface), server-side development (building the back end of the application), database management, and the use of frameworks and libraries. Each of these stages requires careful planning and resource allocation.

3. Budget Management

Understanding the web development process is crucial for effective budget management. Businesses can estimate costs associated with each stage, preventing unexpected financial hurdles. This understanding is even more critical today as the web development industry is projected to grow at an 8.08% annual rate from 2022 to 2028.

In 2024, the global market for web application development is expected to reach $179.90 billion. This growth is driven by emerging trends such as the integration of Blockchain Technology, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), Internet of Things (IoT), and the use of AI-Powered Chatbots.

For instance, the use of Blockchain technology in web development offers numerous benefits, including making transactions more secure and error-free. It’s an example of how understanding the web development process can lead to the integration of new technologies, ultimately influencing budget management.

Moreover, the web development process typically includes six stages: requirement analysis, design, development, testing, implementation, documentation, and evolution. Each stage incurs different costs, and understanding these stages can help businesses allocate their budgets more effectively.

4. Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is fundamental to the web development process, facilitating continuous assessment to establish benchmarks and ensure project quality.

By 2024, the global web application development market is driven by trends like Blockchain integration, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), IoT, and AI-Powered Chatbots. Quality assurance is vital in these advancements, particularly for AI-Powered Chatbots, demanding rigorous testing to deliver accurate information and seamless user experiences.

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) typically comprises six stages: requirement analysis, design, development, testing, implementation, documentation, and evolution. Quality assurance is interwoven throughout, guaranteeing adherence to standards and functionality at each stage.

5. Risk Mitigation

Understanding the web development process is vital for preemptively addressing risks and challenges, especially towards trends in the industry.

For instance, Blockchain technology integration enhances transaction security but introduces complexities and skill requirements. Recognizing these challenges allows businesses to proactively mitigate them.

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) encompasses six stages, each posing unique risks. Design challenges include crafting user-friendly interfaces, while technical issues may arise during development. Identifying and addressing risks at each stage empowers businesses to develop effective mitigation strategies.

6. Communication

Effective communication among project stakeholders is pivotal in the web development process, fostering clarity and alignment while mitigating confusion.

By 2024, the global web application development market is poised to reach $179.90 billion, underscoring its increasing significance. With a staggering 543,000 new businesses emerging daily, which all need digital presence, the process has grown intricate.

Recognizing and comprehending the web development process aids in early risk identification and proactive mitigation. For instance, in the analysis phase, potential technical feasibility issues can be pinpointed and resolved.

7. Decision-Making

The web development process unfolds through several stages: analysis, design, development, testing & review, deployment, and maintenance. Each stage demands distinct skills, guiding stakeholders towards informed decisions.

During analysis, collaboration with clients shapes understanding and requirements. This involves creating user personas, conducting research, and mapping site structures.

In design, emphasis lies on crafting a responsive and intuitive user interface (UI) vital for optimal user experience and website success.

Furthermore, web development evolves with emerging trends and technologies. Modern frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js streamline development with faster cycles and enhanced efficacy.

Consider a web application built on React. Its efficiency in updating and rendering content without page reloads fosters seamless user experiences, driving higher retention and conversion rates.

8. Realistic Expectations

In the realm of web development, setting realistic expectations for project outcomes is paramount. This practice aids stakeholders in foreseeing challenges and setbacks, mitigating frustration and disillusionment.

The web development process comprises stages like analysis, design, development, testing & review, deployment, and maintenance. Each stage demands distinct skills, guiding stakeholders towards informed decisions.

During analysis, collaboration with clients shapes understanding and requirements. This involves creating user personas, conducting research, and mapping site structures.

9. Scope Management

Understanding the web development process is pivotal for managing project scope effectively, aligning goals with capabilities to prevent scope creep.

During analysis, collaboration with clients shapes understanding and requirements. This involves creating user personas, conducting research, and mapping site structures.

3 Prerequisites of a Web Development Process

Before diving into the web development process, it’s crucial to understand the prerequisites that set the foundation for a successful project. In fact, recent statistics show that 85% of users expect a website to be mobile friendly and 38% of all users will stop interacting with a website if it’s unattractive. This emphasises the importance of a suitable methodology.

First, there is a need for clear project goals. Defining what you want to achieve helps define your entire development process. For example, Digital Silk offers a 7 step website development process that requires being very clear about what needs to be done.

Another essential aspect to understand is the target audience. By knowing who will be using the website, devs can make a user-friendly experience. Research reveals that websites with faster loading times have demonstrably higher conversion rates.

Finally, choosing the right technology stack. You can see particular programming languages which are trending majorly – those are JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Such tools and technologies are chosen to make the website scalable and efficient.

By addressing these prerequisites, developers can ensure a smoother web development process and create a website that meets user expectations.

1. Clear project goals

Clear project goals are essential for a successful web development process. They tell you how to do what you are doing to accomplish the project objectives, and all team members are well aligned with that. According to a report by Digital Silk, a well-defined project goal can streamline the web development process and improve efficiency.

Web development projects can be said to be successful only when they have clearly specified, measurable goals from the very beginning. This clarity ensures you don’t end up scope creep and keep the project going as expected. It also gives developers a chance to concentrate on providing high quality results which fulfill customer expectation.

For instance, suppose we want to increase website loading speed. Setting a particular goal, for example, decreasing a load time by 2 secs, helps the development team to build a task list of steps and allows applying performance optimization techniques successfully. Not only does this improve user experience but it also helps with higher conversion rates.

In summary, clear project goals are the foundation of a successful web development process. They make sure everyone on the project knows what the project’s about and everyone is on the same page while trying to achieve those outcomes.

2. Understanding the target audience

Understanding the target audience is crucial in the web development process. This ensures your end product is targeted properly towards its users needs and expectation. Here are some key aspects to consider.

Demographics: Target audience’s age, gender, number, location and income level all help with the design and the functionality of the website. For, instance, a website for young adults might have bright colours and interactive features and a website for professionals might be sleek and simple.
Behavioral Patterns: It’s important that you understand how your target audience uses websites. It consists of their browsing habits, type of content they prefer to interact with and their favorite devices. For example, mobile friendly designs are important for audience that spend more time on smartphones only.
Goals and Needs: You can get a user-centric website by identifying the main goals and needs of the target audience. It can include doing surveys, or analyzing user feedback to collect insight. For instance, the users of an ecommerce website will—highly likely like an e-commerce website that appears professional and easy to navigate and a seamless checkout process.
Competitor Analysis: Checking competitors’ websites will allow you to see what does and doesn’t work. It lets you know what lacking in the market and where there are better opportunities you might want to work on.
Accessibility: A big item to consider is ensuring the website is accessible to anyone, including those with disabilities. It includes following web accessibility practice guidelines and using some screen readers tools to make the content accessible.
SEO and Keywords: Searching for how to optimize the website for search engines is the key to reaching the target audience. That is, using relevant keywords and making the website indexed correctly by search engines.

3. Choosing the right technology stack

Selecting the right technology stack is crucial for a successful web development process. It impacts the project’s performance, scalability and maintainability.

First, you have to see and understand the needs of the project. The technology stack will depend on what it’s building—a simple static website or a complex web application—and its requirements. For instance, a static website may just need HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Whereas a dynamic web application may necessarily call for a full stack solution like MEAN (MongoDB, Express JavaScript, Angular, Node.js).

Secondly, the technology stack you choose has to be performant and scalable. It is important to choose technologies that can handle the anticipated load, and grow as the project grows. Adding a lightweight framework like React.js to your front end development can enhance performance and scalability at the same time.

Another very important factor is development speed. The project can be delayed if technologies with high learning curve or long desired development period are used. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django, with an included set of features and conventions can increase speed in development.

Development and maintenance expenses are also considered in addition to the cost. Reducing costs with open source technologies may have to come with more customization. It’s crucial in the chosen stack to evaluate the total cost of ownership.

It also is vital to be compatible with other systems and tools. It is important that chosen technologies can be made to fit in with other planned systems, smoothly. An example of what would be a good thing would be that a NoSQL database is compatible with the front end framework.

FURTHER READING:

1. 5 Best eCommerce Website Design Services for Success

2. 6 Signs It’s Time to Give Your Website an Overhaul

5 Steps of the Web Development Process

When it comes to building a website or an online application, you need to follow very specific rules and procedures. In the long run, not paying attention to one small thing could cause a lot of problems.

To start, we’ll talk about the five main steps in the life cycle of a web project. We’ll also explain why they’re so important.

Planning and information gathering
Design
The website building
Testing
Launching

1. Planning and information gathering

Web developers start the web development process by planning and making a plan for how to start from the ground up. Discovery sessions, analysis, and research can all lead to great web development success. You can’t get to this point if your development team doesn’t know what your project is about.

The first step in making a well-thought-out plan is to gather all the information you need. By asking the right questions, you can find out what your company needs. The people on your team should think about how a well-designed website could help them reach their goals.

In addition, the development team makes a site map to help people find content more quickly. The site map is like a bird’s-eye view of the website. It also helps you think about how different pages connect to one another and other pages on the site.

A lot of work goes into wireframing and defining layouts, as well as designing the user interface and experience (UI and UX).

2. Design

Next, we’ll start making the website. We made sitemaps and wireframes first, then a roadmap. If the customer and the project specifications say that user interface designers can help, they can, but only if they do. For example, the wireframe design process makes use of fonts and color images. There are also buttons and menus that move.

It starts to look like a website at this point in the web development process. Clients and the people they want to reach should be taken into account when making a design. This includes all visual content, such as images, photos, and videos, in this process.

It’s up to you whether you want a simple picture or a full-fledged picture. A basic information layout is a picture that shows how something works and how someone can understand it. When you look at layouts, you can get a sense of how the final product will look. They can show you how the colors, images, and logos look.

The color scheme used on a website has a big impact on how users feel. Color can make people feel a lot of different things, which makes it a very important tool in design when used in unusual ways.

3. The building of a website

When the customer doesn’t want to write or upload anything, developers do it for them. Data that was gathered during the planning phase is used to make the website come to life as it grows. In this phase, the main goals are to test and lay the groundwork for the next phase.

This stage is usually made up of two parts:

The front-end:

It’s called front-end development because it makes the client-side app visible to people. The designs from the previous stage are turned into HTML pages with animations and effects. There are JavaScript frameworks and libraries like Angular, React, and many more that are used to make JavaScript more complex than simple JavaScript can do. Because so many people use mobile devices, the web app must be responsive and mobile-friendly.

The back-end:

This is making parts of a website that people can’t see. This means the back-end and front-end must talk to each other so that users can use the website’s tools. People do this all the time. Each company has a back-end software developer who makes sure that all of the business logic and data storage are linked together. Databases and APIs are made by people who work on the back end of a computer system. They connect them to the computer system.

4. Testing and deployment

Before your website can go live, it must go through a lot of testing to make sure it will work. There are people on the quality assurance team who check things like functionality, usability, compatibility, performance, and other things about the product. Before putting the website on a server after it’s been built, it would be best to run a lot of rigorous, exact, and repeatable tests to make sure that all problems have been found and fixed.

Testing is an important part of the web development process. The developers and testers make sure that the client’s needs are met when the web project is done. At this point, look for problems with the website’s quality assurance process and browser compatibility. Testers look at all of the features that were made and make sure that the written code is correct. People who test and build the software do integration and regression tests, functional and smoke tests, load and performance tests, and other tests in this phase. Other tests are also done.

Following a check, the website will go on a server. This happens after the quality assurance team has given it the go-ahead.

5. Post-deployment at the end of the web development process

When a website goes live, there is no end to the process of making it. People get source code and project documents from the company. They also work on their ideas. They also help the clients keep their websites running after they have them up and running. In addition, this stage is important because the main function of the web application is now available to users. The need for new versions and updates is always there because of user feedback, support, and upkeep, so new versions and changes are always needed to keep things running well.

They make sure that the customer has everything they need to make this transaction work. To be an effective customer service representative, you must think about your client’s needs and act on them before they even know they need them! It can also cost a lot of money to keep the website running for a long time. You can also do more UX testing on new content and features to make them easier to find and use. There may be different design and development projects that need to happen as a result.

Designveloper’s Web Development Process

At Designveloper, we’re dedicated to transforming client ideas into successful projects through our structured web development process. Our process begins with an initial meeting, where we actively engage with clients to understand their needs. This step helps us identify the project’s scope, including desired features and enhancements for existing apps or websites.

After this first interaction, our team, composed of sales experts, business analysts, developers, designers, and quality control specialists, moves on to creating a rough estimation (RE). Here, we gather all the necessary project details and compile a feature list. This results in an RE that clearly outlines the project’s cost, timeline, and required resources.

Once the client approves the rough estimation, we step into the detailed estimation (DE) phase. At this point, we form a dedicated project team focused on providing a DE with specific features, costs, a detailed work breakdown, and a precise development schedule for each project phase. This marks a critical transition in our web development process, shifting from planning to execution.

Our expertise extends beyond planning. We possess a diverse tech stack to cater to various client needs:

For project infrastructure, we rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its scalability and reliability.
In web development, we often suggest using React or NextJS, known for their efficiency and adaptability.
To develop cross-platform mobile applications, we use React Native and Flutter, enabling our clients to reach wider audiences with a single codebase.
For backend and microservices development, our preference is NestJS, which offers a robust and modular framework. Additionally, we provide MongoDB and PostgreSQL for database solutions, tailored to meet specific project requirements and data management needs.

By following this comprehensive and client-centric web development process, we ensures each solution is customized to fit the project’s objectives, resulting in exceptional and efficient outcomes.

Our achievements

At Designveloper, we take pride in our accomplishments in the web development process. We’ve always displayed a strong proficiency in delivering high-quality projects over time.

Successful Projects: Since 2013, when we first started, we had already completed over 200 web development projects. Notable projects include LuminPDF, a document platform used by over 9 million users, and various enterprise-level solutions for clients across different industries.
Client Satisfaction: A high client retention rate (95 %) of our clients means we have been committed to client satisfaction and the quality of our work we deliver.
Industry Recognition: Designveloper is recognized as one of the best web development agencies in VIetnam. We have received multiple awards for our innovative solutions and exceptional service.
Technological Expertise: We are experts in web development with latest JavaScript, HTML & CSS. We keep ourselves abreast with industry trends to offer state of the art solution to our clients.
Growth and Expansion: We have over time expanded our services to include development of mobile apps, UI/UX and VOIP. This diversification has enabled us to serve a wider market and further achieve a market presence.
Global Reach: Having been working with clients from different parts of the world, we have proved the ability to produce excellent results irrespective of the location.

These achievements highlight Designveloper’s commitment to excellence and innovation in the web development process. And, we keep striving for greatness until every project our clients have is successful.

Conclusion

The web development process starts with an in-depth understanding of the client’s needs, a lot of research and analysis, and then design and development. It can take a long time, be scary, and be unpleasant at times. However, because there is so much information on the internet, this is no longer the case. There are a lot of articles and tutorials out there to help people with this process. With this article, we at Designveloper want to help you and your clients better understand the process of building a website.