The Webby Web Development Process

1. Listen

The first step in a web site design project is to listen to you, to understand your recent experience of your website, or website concept, and to grasp what your business goals are.

2. Plan

The next step is to plan the new website build. This involves researching solutions, setting time frames, and also setting expectations.

3. Design

Once we have the planning in place, the next step is the design of the website. This involves designing the website visitor ‘journey’ through your website (so they get to the end of the journey and hit ‘buy’!), creating a ‘wire frame’ of your website to submit to you for approval, creating a colour palette for your website, producing a ‘responsive’ (mobile friendly) HTML template from the wire frame and colour palette, once you’re happy with the design of this template, we move onto the development phases.

4. Development

Web development in industry terms usually means producing mechanisms within a website to achieve an outcome. This is achieved by a web developer producing custom coding written in a certain programming language, like ‘PHP’ for instance.

In my case, because I am not a formal web developer, and more accurately a website builder, web development means putting together (and customising) pre-developed code modules that solve the website problems faced by my clients. The pre-developed code I use is either very well known to me, or found during research in the planning stage.

The end result is a website that achieves business goals.

5. Maintain

Maintaining your website means ensuring you, my client, know how to edit webpages, image galleries, adjust navigation menus, control specialised modules (often WordPress plugins like WooCommerce) within the website, and are generally happy with how your website is performing.

If you’d like to discuss how we can increase the amount of website visitors or website conversions you receive, then I can offer website optimisation services beyond the website build.

Most websites I build are made with WordPress or Joomla, and generally require updating the core software, or the software controlling extra modules quite regularly. It is generally recommended to make a backup of your website before applying a core software update, in case something goes wrong during or after the update and your website ‘breaks’ (doesn’t display properly, or displays a bare white page. I offer WordPress maintenance contracts if this is a task or worry you don’t want to deal with.