All You Need To Know About Website Design And Development

In today’s world, everything is getting digitized. In most of the industry, we have already shifted from paperwork to digital work. As the industry is shifting towards getting smarter and digital companies also needs to go with the trend to survive in the industry. We have seen many of the companies are getting failed just because they have failed to move as per the trend; they failed to get themselves updated with the latest technology. Not only large scale companies, but this issue is also affecting a lot of small size business. For example, let’s talk about a mid-size cloth store in a small town. As the e-commerce industry is getting popularity, such small stores are into serious trouble. Everyone is getting familiar with online ordering, and this is giving these small offline retailers a serious headache. There is no option for them other than keeping themselves updated with these trends and technology.

As digitalization is the root cause for all their trouble but if they look at the brighter side then these technology advancements are also providing the same platform to grow more. The best part is many of them have already realized this, and they are working towards making their business up to date. To prevent themselves from collapsing, all these businesses are shifting to online. Many of them started a collaboration with available e-commerce websites, and many have chosen to develop their website and to provide their service online. Website design and development is not a very complex process. People who have never tried to know about it are the only ones who find it difficult. There is some specific process that you need to follow and some concepts you need to understand to design your website. Not just for businesses, the website design process can help to all those who are having some idea but they do not know how to develop it. Also, it will be useful for the one who wants to start their blogs or channels.

Process of website design :

It is not mandatory to follow all the steps in order, but it is always recommended to follow some basic steps to design the website most effectively and properly. Below are some guidelines that should be followed to start your website design process:

1. Before starting the actual development process first make sure to have a crystal clear idea about what you want to build. Having the actual prototype in mind is important before starting. As the first phase of developing any software is requirement analysis hence to developing a website also you have to start with it. Gathering all the requirements you want to add to the website will help to choose the technology stack. These analyses can be different for a different person, so there are no specific rules for it. You just need to define and understand your complete requirement accurately and briefly. You also need to consider your target audience for whom you are going to design the website. Based on your target audience, the interface of the website should be designed.
2. Choosing your platform is what you have to do once you are done with the first step of requirement gathering. There are many options available to build site, based on your technical expertise. If you are technically sound and having knowledge about web development techniques, then you can choose to code it by yourself. This could be a time-consuming process, but definitely, it is going to cost a lot less than another way out. One more benefit of designing it by yourself is that you would have a complete insight into your website and in future, if you wish to make any changes, then you can do it by yourself. You would not need anyone to maintain your site.
3. There are some other ways out, if you do not have any coding background, then it is really difficult to design the website on your own. There are plenty of websites available, which helps you to design the website in very less time that too without knowing anything about coding. It’s called website builder, where you just have to have your prototype and requirement clear. These are just like drag and drop tools, that allows you to design your website just by using some template. It will take very less time to develop the site but some of the premium website builders may not be free. You need to invest some amount to get the premium template.  There is also an option of hiring a freelancer developer to build the website. It will be going to cost more but there you will get what you want without investing your effort.
4. Once you have selected the platform, you need to choose the technology stack for it. There are many different languages available for front end development such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Angular JS, React JS, Python with Django and many more. You need to have the complete idea of that language before making it your choice. Because once you finalize it there is no option to back out in future or change it afterwards. So by considering all your future needs, do some research on these technologies and then make your choice. For example, if you are willing to create a simple website or blog then HTML and CSS will be enough but if you are willing to design web application of one page then you have to use JavaScript and Angular JS. Angular JS and react JS are the additional library and framework of JavaScript that is used in modern web development.  Sites that can be used in the mobile browser as well as desktop. One page web development is the latest trend that everyone is rushing towards.
5. Choosing your design and template is the next important step to design the website. To build your website, you need to finalize the theme and layout of the website. This plays a very important role in the user experience. Better user experience is going to attract several visitors and no one wants to go to the website that does not attract at first so making the impression is very important and that will depend on the layout and template of the site. There are many templates available that you can buy and use in your website design. This premium template will be going to help in future so if you can invest some amount then this the right place to make your investment. Try to design website with the latest advanced technology. Try to add decent but attractive images in the website. A website should not be so much colour that can affect the user experience.
6. Picking up a good colour on the website is very important to make it look good. Where good colour choice can help to provide a smooth experience, and picking up odd colours can make the site look ugly. Also, the images and logos place should be picked up very carefully; these small things can make a lot of difference in bigger picture so do try not to avoid these steps and do not take any of these steps lightly.
7. The picture that you use on the website should be proper resized and compressed. By adding more multimedia on the website can cause slow loading time, which will be very bad for the page. Load time of the web page depends entirely on the way of development so keep these pointers in mind while designing the website.
8. After all, these, do focus on the fonts and content of the website. Once you are done with layout and homepage, content plays a major role in making the website effective. So make sure to use attractive yet simple fonts for main contents. Fonts should not be much fancy. Simple font with normal font size would be ideal for the site. All the contents whether it is heading or description should be properly readable to the users.

By following the above steps, you can design a great quality working website, but that is not the end of the story because designing is not the end of the process. To make it online there are some further steps required to be complete. Without hosting the website it will be available in your local system only. To make it live on the web you need to host the site using some hosting service provider. It is the next and final step towards the development of the website.

Hosting and making it live

Once you are done with development and designing part you need to test your website to get an insight into its performance and workability. You need to be sure that you have succeeded to design the website as per the requirement gathered at the beginning. To do that, make sure that all the functionality is working or not, all the content and heading should be readable. Once you are done with testing the next step is to search for hosting providers. Certain points should be considered before choosing the hosting service provider:

 

• It is always recommended to not to always go for cheap service providers because it comes with the cost of many restrictions.
• Cheap hosting providers always attracts the users but in future, they impose a lot of restrictions on data storage and usability of the website. So it is good to invest some good amount in this phase because it is going to help in the future.
• Profit of choosing the premium host providers is that they provide great customer service in case of any issue, automatic backup option is available in case of emergency, helps to troubleshoot the issue with proper documentation, provides scalability to your website.
• There are many host providers available, you can do some more research, read customer reviews and make the decision based on your preference. Service is available in monthly payments as well as annually pay option.

Testing and Promotion :

Once you are done with all these steps, your website is now live on the web. After this successfully deployment testing should be done before promoting it to target audiences. To make sure a great first impression, once test all the use case of your website. This is an easy but very important phase because any encountered problem can cause harm to your website marketing. Also in case of any problem, add contact us page on the website and try to help visitors with that. For promoting the website there are many platforms available. Using your official social media account, you can promote your website. Also, there are many social media tools available in the market that helps to promote the website and get more reach. You should know SEO tools to get more reach on your website. SEO is searching tools that help to find out most visited keywords in any specific niche. Learning these tools and implementing it will surely be going to get several visitors. Many digital marketing companies can help you to get the number of visitors. They use many social media marketing tools such as email marketing, online marketing, Search engine optimization, Quora marketing, advertisement, Google AdWords etc. These are some paid service using which you can get several hits on your website.

That’s all, hope you have got some idea about the website design process and developing as well as the process of getting it live on the web. The process is not much complicated; it depends on the investment. If you can invest a good amount, then you can get your site live within a few days. It is always recommended to build it on your own, that is going to help you in the long run because you would be able to maintain and troubleshoot any issue that visitors might encounter. Also, it gives you the freedom to add some new features in the future so try to follow the provided steps and implement your idea in reality.

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