Guide To Building Successful Websites
Planning and Developing
Posted by Adam Hayes
Building a website requires careful planning and a strong foundation.
There are many steps that you need to go through in order to get a website up and running. While many people may skip some steps or hurry through others, each step is an important part of the process as a whole.
The first part of the process is to discover: understand your customers, research keywords, determine objectives, understanding the sales process, and more. Here at AHFX, we send information sheets that help collect this information so that we can be ready to move on in the website design process.
The next part of this process is to design the content, appearance, and navigation of the website. Items are placed in specific places throughout the website in order to draw customers in and persuade them to act. After the design is approved, AHFX codes a simple page to show how the website would look and respond to users. If all is well, we continue to development.
Development of the website is where the coding of all of the pages and functionality comes in. The amount of time this step takes depends on a lot of things, but this step is usually much simpler than previous steps. The earlier steps built a foundation for the website, and as long as they were done properly, we are able to know everything we need to do for the development step.
After completing the development, it is possible to refine and optimize the website. Measuring page statistics, key search terms, and conversion rates allows us to be able to polish the website and make it stand out more. Here, we assure that our discovery was done correctly and that those goals we had set are being achieved.
When these steps are followed through and done correctly, in the end, we will have exactly what we were hoping for. The website will look and feel right, persuade visitors, and make sense as a whole. AHFX uses this guide and knows that it works and satisfies clients.