Checking the Pulse of Successful Website Development Projects: The Four Strong Pillars it Stands On

Despite enormous technology advancements, the websites still have a pervasive influence on the world. Yet, the significant number of websites projects hit on the development floor and the website projects succeeded in achieving the desired business goals. However, there is a vast disparity in success rate and website development rate.

According to research, 25% of web projects fail either they are delayed or go over-budget.

It’s disastrous. There is no cut and dried answer or rule of thumb that can prevent website project failure. However, strategic planning, process, and a couple of tips when followed before moving the website project into development orbits, the iconic success is business’s way.

In this blog, the groundwork needs to be done ahead of the website development, the decisions to take in the pre-development stage, and how to deliver a scalable solution to the businesses are outlined.

Let’s dive in!

Building the backbone

Website development is not just about coding where the developers shape the website, design technology infrastructure, and build features to let the users perform an intended action. Behind the scenes, the website development project call for different specialists who play distinct roles.

The developers who work as technicians, designers work as artists, UX planners, content specialists, SEO specialists, analytics specialist, project managers, account managers, and clients involved in the web project and sit around the same table to discuss the development nitty-gritty so that everyone has a clear understanding of what needs to be built and web development technologies that need to be integrated.

The right web development consulting team is critical to project success as the close collaboration, and seamless communication ensures that everyone is sailing in the same boat and moving ahead to shape the business vision in the project. The team must be assembled after looking at the track record, reliability, and responsiveness of the professionals to make the project a big hit. Also, the team cannot be the same for all the projects because the team is created based on business initiatives and goals.

Defining key objectives for web development

Purpose

The high-level purpose of the website is described for which it needs to be built. It can be selling the products, promote an event, provide information, or gamify the services.

Goal

What’s the business objective behind website development? What are they expecting from the investment of thousands of dollars? Is it sharing information, monetization, or promotion? It’s clarified.

Target audience

The bigger picture of the ideal user is shown to let the developers know for which group of the users the website will be built. The braces of age, gender, geography, demographics, and interest help in designing the website that goes well with the target audience.

Content

Mostly underestimated, but content plays a vital role in illustrating the type of information that aligns with target users’ taste and preferences. The information written on the website communicates with the users and make them act.

Going ahead with different development phases

Discovery workshop

The key objectives provide the higher level of information about the project and the business goal, which is not enough to create a strategy or move into designing phase. The extensive research and in-depth analysis of the business goal, competitive landscape, and how the project success relates to the current business digital presence are done to identify what are the business expectations and how they anticipate the website project to fulfill it.

The clear understanding of website optimization needs, user experience issues, and brand position in the niche industry help in knowing what kind of experiences the site is creating and the differences that business is envisioning post-website development. The discovery phase helps in bridging the gap.

The quantitative research provides statistics, in addition to high-level findings which reveals how reliable the business idea is and whether outcomes can be achieved with website optimization or not. The discovery workshop helps in checking the assumptions and turning them into accurate decisions with strategic recommendations that will increase website usability, improve engagement rate, enhance conversion rate, and bring other positive impacts.

Creating a strategy

The discovery phase helps in creating the outline of the real website taking all the insights into consideration that are gathered from the target audience, client interview, competition, and current site audit.

The next step is to incorporate the insights into an actionable plan for the website development project, in addition to making legitimate recommendations by highlighting the potential areas of improvement and illustrating the significant trends to implement to achieve the goals based on the analysis. The powerful analytics tools aids in clearly defining the objectives and making the recommendations.

With cross-departmental collaboration, strategists collaborate with the team members of different departments to ensure their insights on information architecture, graphic design, branding, and functionalities are taken in the actionable plan, and right decisions are made to create a user-centric solution.

UX Planning

The rough sketch of the website designed by the strategists with a collective decision is the raw format, that’s not optimized for the user experience. Here comes the role of UX planner who is responsible for making the decisions around engineering the brilliant user experience. Wearing the end user lens, the website architecture is created, the layout is defined, and content is arranged that can be easily viewed, accessed, and digested by the users.

At first, the strategy is translated into a website sitemap that determines the number of pages, the position of pages in the structure, and relations between the pages to identify how user-friendly and easy-to-navigate the website is. The sitemap describes how easily the user can land on different pages from any point of the website.

Later, wireframe or mock-ups- the visual blueprint of the website interface is created that helps in knowing the elements to add and arrange on each page. It demonstrates the user journey like how the user interacts with the website. Also, the technology stack- coding language, framework, and CMS to leverage are unveiled at this stage.

Designing

It’s time when the website takes the visual shape, where the sitemap and wireframe created after strategic planning and UX research plays crucial in designing. The website design decisions must sync with the strategy, and design elements should focus on meeting the goal because aesthetics designed must suit the brand and the audience. For instance, the focus of entertainment website design is creating an experience, and of information website is usability, so the UI  is engineered accordingly.

The professional web designer adds life to the website’s look and feels by creating the graphic sketch of the user interface and crafting the design elements following the design best practices, and latest design trends, and complying with principle style guides.

In view of the device fragmentation issue, the user-centered responsive design is created so that users have a seamless experience across every digital device, be it a mobile, desktop, or tablet from which they are accessing the website. The UI is created in a story-telling way to make website memorable and visually appealing, which in turn, make the design in line with modern users and enable the brand to reach the objectives.

Finally, develop and deliver

At this stage, the role of coding superheroes comes to the fore where the strategic, creative, and user-focused vision is brought into life with proper execution. At first, the home page and then all other pages are created as per the website hierarchy created in the sitemap. The advanced features and web page interactions are developed. Later, framework and CMS are implemented to make certain server can handle installation and set-up.

When the final website project is developed, it’s time to deliver the final product. Hold on! It’s unrealistic to expect everything comes out right for the first time. It’s essential to measure website success in terms of usability, engagement, experience, and performance. The test-revise-iterate is part and parcel of the website development services to fix every issue ahead of the time.

The website should be regularly updated to fix the bugs, eliminate security risks, and add new improvements to keep it up-to-date.

Epilogue

Website development is not a daunting task as long as it’s developed following a process. Hire web app developers who follow the four step process diligently. When every action from strategy creation and UX planning to design and development is backed by specific business objectives, there is no chance the team will lose track of goals or end up building a website that doesn’t work in context.

The four stages serve as the base for building a great website and don’t let the team fall into the traps of developing a beautiful website that does not fit in with the website purpose. This development approach makes the foundation of web development strong, and the end-product brings profound success to the brand. Read this web development guide to gain more insights into the process of building an innovative and functional website that has a strong and sturdy foundation.

Purvi

Technology, the heart of the new age business, is her interest. Her association with technology and business is well balanced to offer solutions that will lead organizations towards success. She likes to explore technical feasibilities that will functionalize business requirements productively. She likes to visit tech forums, to answer developer queries, to find new ways and write about technologies that will mobilize businesses.