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Everything You Need to Know About Website Development

You’re surely a business that offers satisfactory services to its clients. But in the digital age that we’re in, it just isn’t enough and one has to create a website for business. If you compare the scenario the prevailed a decade before, you will observe that building a website like older times isn’t a luxury now.

You can easily get in touch with a web development company and get your website on the internet within a few months. For the past 5 years, the importance of digital marketing has been understood by a large part of entrepreneurs. No matter how successful a brick-and-mortar business you own, a website for entrepreneurs acts as a boon to increase your brand’s reach and recognition.

While website creation has now become a known necessity, there is a lot of confusion oh the essentials of developing a website for your business. To untangle this web of thoughts we bring this complete guide that touches the most important aspects of website development. Read on till the end to learn the whole process of website development i.e. from inception to launch.

To create a website you must first learn the options available for you to choose from. Here’s a list of the same.

Types of Website you can Create

You can create a website depending on the business you do or the profession you’re in. The list for the same is as follows.

• eCommerce website
• Business website
• Personal blog
• Portfolio website
• Brochure website
• Non-profit website
• Media or Entertainment website
• Wiki or Community forum
• Landing Page

Let’s catch a glimpse of each of the above in brief.

eCommerce Website

If you’re into the business of selling products or services you can choose to create an eCommerce website for the same. It’s the direct route to reach your consumers without them having to visit your stores physically. As you have a product to sell you don’t have to worry about monetizing your website via content or ads.

Business Website

If you own a business and have never invested in marking your digital presence, now is just the right time to do so. It has become a norm for 70-80% of consumers to search for a business online before they make a purchase. Yet you would be surprised to know that only 50% of the businesses have websites. So, 50% of entrepreneurs who don’t have a website are losing critical business to their competitors. 

Personal Blog

The blogging culture has flourished since the advent of the internet. Yet in today’s times, due to the increased competition bloggers now prefer to create their log website. These blog websites generally focus on a specific niche and are updated and maintained by a single person. 

Here’s a list of some of the common website blog categories:

• Fashion
• Beauty
• Healthcare & hygiene
• Food & recipes
• Psychological Health
• Lifestyle & travel
• Self-improvement
• Parenting

Portfolio Website

Carrying a physical portfolio everywhere you go has become old news. Nowadays, artists use a portfolio website to showcase their talents and work. Thanks to emerging techs like Augmented Reality you can now present your work more expressively. With a website for this now you can showcase your work anytime and anywhere. Freelancers and creative individuals can make the best of this by creating an engaging website with eye-catchy color schemes and themes.

Brochure Website

A brochure website can also be viewed as the minimal version of your business website. As opposed to your conventional business website, a brochure website contains just the essential information about your company. If you’re sure that a website won’t be an important driver for your business you can try this website. A typical business website would also consume a lot of your resources and so you must have a good budget if you opt for the same. 

Non-profit websites

Non-profit websites are in trend for the past 5 years. With the revolutionary rise in awareness of health and fitness, psychological diseases, domestic abuse, NGO organizations, and more nonprofit websites have helped on a large scale. As a website is available for all on the internet, it extends the reach for your services and helps collect funds and build support for your cause. 

Media or Entertainment Websites

If you consume content on the internet, you’ve surely come to use these websites. These websites stream news, movies, television shows, and more. Since the advent of YouTube, these video websites have also gained major attraction. Such websites account for such long hours spent on the web by users. It’s difficult to differentiate between the entertainment and media world. Yet, media websites only consist of news and events presented by journalists and reporters.

Wiki or Community Forum

The foundation of such websites is through their readers. A community forum and wiki are two separate things though. Community forums are designed to offer a platform to conduct discussions and conversations on certain topics. When a user creates a post related to the medium’s related topics, other users can pitch their comments and the process continues. On the other hand, Wikis are primarily designed for educational purposes. You will be familiar with the world’s most famous wiki website, Wikipedia.

Landing Page

A landing page can be a one-page website that offers essential information on your business product and services. 

Why Do You Need to Do Market Research Before Creating a Website?

As per a survey, only 50% of businesses clear the 5-year mark. Hence, knowing how to sell to your consumers and more about your consumer’s pains and patterns conduction a thorough market research is of prime importance. Here’s a list of some of the prominent reasons why you should do the same.

To know your Audience

Before you invest all of your budgets into creating an advanced website it’s important to organize your content and learn what they expect. If the niche you’re targeting isn’t familiar with the internet world or expects these services to be delivered in a certain way, then market research will determine the same very well. 

If you don’t offer services as your client expects, there will be no sales. So developing a website service that no one wants is not worth investing your time and resources into.

To know What your Competitors are Offering

Any business that you’re into will have some competition, less or more will depend on the industry that you’ve targeted. Consumers are very well aware of the competitors that your business has and will compare your services to theirs. If you learn what your competitors are already offering you can offer additional or better services than them. This will help you earn customer loyalty while presenting your services in a unique light. 

To Learn How you can Sell your Products or Services

Selling products or services online as compared to a brick-and-mortar store is completely different. In a physical store, you can win your consumer’s confidence as you are available. In an online store, everything depends on how you represent your service i.e. by designing an engaging and intuitive UI/UX. How you earn your client’s trust is also a crucial factor for increasing your online sales.

One other necessity is the way you place your product. As opposed to a brick-and-mortar you would have to describe the product in a detailed manner. Each and everything about your product, how it is built, and what it can do should be mentioned. Many companies who don’t put the effort into this area don’t get many sales.

MVP or Fully-Functional Application

This might be your first website for business or businesses nowadays also create a website for startups from the go. In both cases, it’s best advisable that you dread carefully. If this is your first business venture, you might be short on your budget and want an effective website rather than a fully functional one. If you’re an experienced business owner but aren’t familiar with the online world, it’s better to take one step at a time. Creating an MVP is like following the proverb “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

You can decide the scope of your project and the investment you can afford and then decide which preceding type of website you want to create. You will be able to analyze this with in-depth market research about how you wish to lure your consumers. 

Which Web Development Methodology is Best for Web Development?

Website or application development is a cumbersome process that needs collaboration from many teams. Choosing the right software development methodology can add structure to your software development workflow. Yet you should select your software development methodology depending on your size, goals, and other factors. Here’s a list of all the most renowned app development methodologies that can work best for your new website. 

• Waterfall
• Lean IT
• Agile
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Extreme Programming

Waterfall

The waterfall model is the oldest of all that was introduced in the year 1970. The waterfall model offers a sequential flow and follows a plan-driven approach. Though the model has been outdated by the other modern methodologies, yet stays one of the most successful models for decades. 

Waterfall serves like its name, a stream of software development phases being executed successively. The limitation with this model is that until and unless the previous phase has been completed there can’t be any transition to the next one. This stands as a big advantage because if you make changes in one phase then you would also have to map those changes in the subsequent phases. 

Pros

• Best suitable for small projects that have specific requirements.
• Can be understood and implemented easily.

Cons

• Plenty of documentation and structure.
• Not suitable for complicated and long projects.
• Increases uncertainty and risk.
• Changes cannot be mapped easily.

Leat IT

Lean is a combination of a mindset and methodology. It has managed to follow practices and principles from the manufacturing businesses and applied them successfully to other industries. Lean offers value with fewer losses and waste. Software development teams have started implementing Lean for the practices, philosophies, and tools it offers to innovate at a scale. 

Lean focuses on the principles of optimizing the complete project, removing redundancy, creating quality, gathering knowledge, postponing commitment, and faster delivery. Using lean one can develop a sustainable culture for innovation while benefiting the development system and the whole system.

Agile

To enhance productivity in software development, Agile was born out of the Agile Manifesto. There was an increasing frustration in the market with the waterfall model and other rigid and structured methodologies. Agile inculcates changes easily and offers faster results. 

Agile has received such popularity because it examines interactions and their relationship adding more value to individuals. You can observe customer collaboration in the entire development process. It welcomes changes while functioning with the sole aim of offering seamless software as opposed to documentation. Agile has been designed to handle the variability and complexity of software development. 

Teams have short iterations or sprints that are limited by a fixed time duration and targets to be delivered. Yet, these targets need not be delivered in a particular order. The main aim of teams is to deliver tangible software. The topmost priority with the Agile approach is client satisfaction.

Scrum

Scrum is another way to implement Agile’s approach. It follows Agile’s beliefs that developers and teams should collaborate daily. Scrum too uses an iterative approach to develop its software. As it requires self-management and self-organization, disciplined and experienced workers on smaller teams might find it more successful. 

Teams working with scrum tend to break larger goals into smaller ones and work through them using fixed-length sprints. Daily scrum meeting follows an important role as the scrum master tracks progress and gathers feedback. Scrum is a mixture of traditional methodologies offering discipline and structure along with modern Agile with its iterative and flexible processes. 

Kanban

Kanban was developed by the managers of Toyota, the same as Lean. It offers the convenience of workflow visualization. You can visually mark progress by creating a physical panel named Kanban board. Multiple individuals or teams can share the Kanban board. 

It’s similar to Scrum but with a few differences:

• No specified roles for group members.
• To offer efficient results limits the amount of work in progress.
• Sprint defines its tasks strictly while changes can be mapped using Kanban.

Extreme Programming (XP)

One of the most controversial Agile methodologies is Extreme Programming (XP). It has collected a lot of similar approaches from Kanban, Lean, & Scrum. They include continuous testing (lean), small releases (Kanban), continuous planning (Scrum), allotted time (1-3 weeks), customer involvement. Many believe that Scrum is a subset of XP. 

Technource’s Approach

Technource a PHP web development company has been serving the IT service industry for 9+ years. Through our long experience in this field, it has come to our understanding after many experiments that the Agile-Scrum methodology works best for our app development projects.

The transparency and ease it offers to us and our clients while working on a particular project are incomparable to other methodologies that we’ve tried. No matter what we’re trying to create, a small business website or an enterprise-level application, Agile-Scrum offers the highest level of productivity and convenience. 

Now, we’ve learned a lot about the ways that we can approach web development, let’s get to the meat of the subject. Here is a sequential guide to developing your website.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating your Website

Creating a website needs planning and execution. Here’s a brief guide that helps you gather awareness on how a website development project works.

Step 1: Have a definite vision for your website.

What is it that you want to accomplish via your website? This is the most important question that you should ask before creating one for yourself. This end goal can be anything depending on which industry you belong to. For instance, do you want your consumers to make purchases? Do you want readers to read and share your blogs? What is it that a visitor should do once they visit your website?

Purpose

In this phase, you decide on the objective of your website. You can be a financial consult and would wish your clients to sign up a simple contact form for you to get in touch. You can be a Yoga teacher and wish to impart the right practices to practice Yoga and increase your followers.

As you start developing, you should keep this purpose in mind and plan how you can design a service that serves your purpose in the best way.

Design

The design of your website doesn’t just relate to how attractive your website is by the looks of it. It’s more related to how it works. You want your website to have a conversation with the consumer as you can’t do the same physically. 

Your website’s logo, color schemes, content, imagery, UI/UX, and other things hugely contribute to developing an intuitive website. The website you create should be easy to maintain and intuitive to use. It should speak volumes for the services you’re trying to offer. 

Content

Content will prove to be the prime attention seeker for your website. You should have a sitemap of the service pages that you want and what exact content those pages should have. For instance, you can have pages such as ‘Home’, ‘Testimonials’, ‘Portfolio’, ‘Contact Us’, ‘Services’, and more. So, you must decide what information you want to add to each page. Quality content should be a top priority for creating an engaging website.

Step 2: Buy your domain name

A domain name is an address that a user types to get access to your website. So if you own a food business named “Ahmedabad Tiffin Service” you would have to make a domain search to check if this name is available. If not you would have to choose something that acts as a forefront for your business. So, it’s suggested that you select multiple names before doing your domain search. 

To do the same you would have to seek help from domain name registrars. Some of the well-known registrars are GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Domain.com. You can try a domain name registrar website to check if you’re selected name is available or not. You should keep trying until you find the one that’s not taken. Domain names generally cost between 10 USD – 15 USD per annum. Though the preceding companies also offer free domain names to first-time buyers. 

Step 3: Select your hosting provider

If you feel that your businesses’ website will be its primary revenue stream choosing the correct hosting provider is extremely important. Your website would need space to store content, files, images, and more. Where do think all these things are stored? Your website content gets stored in a physical location provided by the hosting provider.

So, it becomes important to choose a hosting provider that offers enough bandwidth to handle your website traffic. If you start small make sure you do select a plan that can be customized to increase your bandwidth when need be. 

The web host you choose must be secure. Your host must offer regular web maintenance along with security features such as an SSL certificate. This will ensure the safety of your users while accessing your website.

You need to select your hosting provider wisely based on the guaranteed uptime, budget, and storage space that you need. Here’s a list of some of the popular hosting providers that you can choose from. 

GoDaddy: One can access hosting solutions for as low as 1 USD. 
DreamHost: Customizable hosting solutions at affordable rates. 
Hostinger: Scalable hosting solutions that start at the price of 2 USD/month. 
Bluehost: Secure hosting solution that offers advanced security add-ons with speed. 

Step 4: Choose your framework for web development.

Selecting the right development framework is crucial to creating a great website. You should make this decision by asking yourself how conventional or unconventional your website is. For instance, a blog will be a good example of a conventional website while Uber is the perfect example of an unconventional one. Here’s a list of attributes that you should keep in mind while selecting one.

• Learning curve
• Ease of installation
• Core library
• Database abstraction and ORM
• Scalability
• Community
• Documentation
• Updates/Bug Fixes
• Hosting requirements
• Software pattern
• License

Step 5: Choose how you want to go about building your website.There are three basic ways that you can select for creating your website.

Do it Yourself

This is the toughest road that you can take for creating your website. If you opt for this you would be on a tremendous learning curve. It’s like swimming against the waves, too difficult but rewarding at the same time. If you can achieve this feat you will be the master of your n website ready to take on any challenge that gets thrown your way.

Hire a Freelancer

A freelancer can free a lot of your time and spare you the boredom of dealing with all the technical jargon. So, you can utilize that time to concentrate on other things essential for your website and business. Finding how authentic a freelancer is with the services they provide is extremely important for the timely and efficient completion of your project. Many freelancers don’t deliver as per the promises they’ve made. This would be a complete waste of your resources.

Hire an IT Company

Choosing an IT company to create your website is the safest option that will yield guaranteed results. You can get in touch with a MEAN stack development firm to develop a complete website with a sturdy tech stack. An experienced IT provider will also offer you the option to use their MERN stack development services in case the MEAN tech stack isn’t in congruence with the scope of your project. 

With this option, you can rest assured that your project is in the hands of experts. Yet you must select your app development company wisely as it would demand some financial investment. For example, an IT service company from India would charge 25 USD – 60 USD/ hour while the same from the US can charge anywhere between 250 USD – 300 USD. 

Step 5: Develop your Website with a Website Builder

If you feel that you don’t want to opt for a dedicated framework you can use a website builder to create the same. Here’s a list of some of the prominent platforms used for website creation all around the globe. 

WordPress

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that powers more than 37% of sites on the internet and hence is called a leading platform for website creation. It isn’t that hard to grasp if you want to create a simple website. But if you plan on developing a customizable project you do have to invest some of your extra time. 

Building your website using WordPress can prove to be an easy task for a simple task but a cumbersome one for a complex website. To ease your process you can seek help from a WordPress development company and hire WordPress developers. They will understand your project requirements and brainstorm solutions that meet your specific needs.

Shopify

Shopify is the perfect solution for you to start your retail business. It will help you ship, sell, and manage your products easily. Making use of its services you can process orders, add products, and store your business data. You can start with your online retail store for as low as 29 USD/month. The platform is user-friendly and doesn’t take a tech geek to figure out how it works.

Magento

Magento is powering a whopping 250,000 stores today. It’s one of the most preferable eCommerce platforms used by companies of any size from SMBs to enterprise brands to sell products online. Research shows that Magento covers almost 20% of all eCommerce shops.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the eCommerce plugin that is powered by WordPress. The platform is easy to use, open-source, and highly customizable. Due to WordPress, the platform offers tons of interesting themes and features to make your website engaging. It doesn’t matter what you want to sell, music and books or shoes and clothes, WooCommerce has just the perfect collection of plug-ins for you. It offers complete control over your store.

Step 6: Select your Website’s Theme

The theme of your website plays a vital role in getting customers hooked from their very first visit.  If your website doesn’t appear pleasing to the eyes, you can lose potential customers who wouldn’t try to see what products or services you have to offer. Here are some essential things that one should keep in mind while creating a website. 

Technource has built many top-notch websites for our clients around the globe using the MEAN and MERN tech stacks. So if you want to create an engaging website you seek our expertise and hire MEAN stack developers or hire MERN stack developers. We’d be happy to build a website that suits your unique business idea.

Look & Feel

The look and feel are everything to a first-time visitor of your site. You have to sell your website by making them believe that it’s worth investing in by giving it a tempting look and feel. Using this you can convince your consumers that your website is at least worth looking into.

Responsiveness

There is nothing better than having a responsive website. Many websites offer great services but take too long to load or while responding to other user requests. The world today is in a hurry, they want every result in a flash. Researches indicate that a user that leaves your website because it isn’t responsive enough never returns. 

Additional Extensions & Plugins

Some extensions and plugins add many features and functionalities to your website. They work better than a theme. So if you have already decided on the same, you should make sure they’re compatible with the theme you choose. 

Step 7: Get your Website’s Content Ready

What you post as content on your website communicates directly with a user. You can have conversations with a user by intelligently organizing your content. Your website might have more than one page and you must post relevant content on your website. 

At times site owners tend to overestimate the services they provide but aren’t able to deliver the same. This creates a huge impact on your reputation. Hence, you must include only those things in your website content that exactly speak for the services you’re trying to provide.

Step 8: Add Functionality to your Website

You can enhance your user experience by adding extra functionality to it. Here are a few days to do the same.

Media Plug-ins

Every website needs to add images, videos, and other media to its website. A media plug-in would help you store and organize content in a better way on your website while offering you robust storage options. 

eCommerce Integrations

Do you want your website to conduct sales for your products and services? If yes, you can try out the website builders that are mentioned in the preceding section.

Scheduling Apps

Are you creating a website that makes use of schedules to avail your services? If yes, then it’s you need to include apps such as Square Appointments or Calendly. 

Security Apps

Your website can receive a lot of confidential consumer data, such as passwords, credit & debit card details, and more. As data theft has become a huge concern in today’s day and age, you should try security apps to keep a check on the same.

Step 9: Measure Key Metrics

Once your site goes live, it interacts with consumers in various ways. Using tools such as Google Analytics you can learn the interactions that take place between a consumer and your website.

There is CRM software that you can use to measure all of your site’s activity. Using this you can map patterns on important data such as:

• At what time intervals of the day does your site receive the highest traffic?
• What is your conversion rate?
• How many customers decline transactions after reaching the final check-out page?

There are a whole lot of feedbacks that can enlighten you with improvements that you can make to your website. Those feedbacks are hidden in this data. 

Step 10: Quality Assurance

The launch of your website will be its final test. You have to stay on top of everything and make sure that your site is always up and running. You have to conduct a quality assurance test from an expert on the subject. As your website will be accessed on numerous devices having different screen sizes and aspect ratios. There can be technical errors with the code. To make sure these things don’t happen quality assurance checks are a must. 

Step 11: Seek Feedbacks & Make Improvements

This will be more of duty after you launch your website. You will have to make sure that you collect feedbacks from sound users and implement those changes with precision. Entrepreneurs should remember that their opinion on their product after it launches matters least. It’s what a user wants that matters the most.

Cost of Developing a Website 

Asking what a website cost is like asking ‘how much does a house costs?’ The answer to this question depends on who’s asking? Everyone in the world get can get a different quotation as per their requirement. Yet we’ve managed to create a tentative price range for different websites.

eCommerce Website: 10,000 USD – 75,000 USD
Brochure Website: 5,000 USD – 10,000 USD
Educational Website: 5,000 USD – 70,000 USD
Corporate Website: 3,000 USD – 40,000 USD

The above-mentioned rates can differ with changes in the scope of the project. 

Afterword

The online game is on and it’s not going to end soon. Businesses all over the globe are growing aware of how important has it become to have your digital presence. It’s the difference between being recognized by 1000 individuals you do business with or being recognized by tens of thousands of individuals who seek the services you have to offer or who want to do business with you. 

Many of our clients are always looking forward to hire PHP developers. We must say that PHP is a veteran of web development technologies that are present today. And we’ve developed some of our most prominent projects using this sturdy tech.

From PHP to Python to other emerging techs, we’ve got you covered. Yes, we also offer Python development services for software, backend & frontend development, writing system scripts, data science, and more. Get in touch with us today.

How long will it take to build a website?

A small business website can take up to 8-10 weeks. The website development time also depends on your availability during its initial phase. Your feedback, the time it takes to get the content right, the design and development phase, quality assurance, and more. Complex websites can take more time. 

Will I get full control over my website once it’s finished?

Yes! We love it when our clients show character and take the responsibility of managing it by themselves. We’ll provide you will all the necessary tutorials and videos to learn your way around. 

Will you help me with the bugs and fixes after my site is launched?

Yes, we offer post-project consultation to many of our clients at budget-friendly rates. The rates depend widely on the scale of your project. 

Will my website be mobile-friendly?

Seeing the number of smartphone users in the world, it will be foolish of us to design a website that isn’t mobile-friendly. Your website will be accessible across various devices. 

Where should I host my website?

Finding a reliable host for your website is extremely important. As far as the services are concerned, you get what you pay for. We will give you a curated list of hosting providers that offer reliable services at affordable prices. 

I have a tight budget? Can I still build my website?

Yes! Developing a fully functional custom website can be costly. But if you’re on a tight budget we recommend you opt for an MVP. MVP would get you in the digital world with your site’s most important features.