Exploring the End-to-End Website Development Process
If you're unfamiliar with the website development process and don't know what to expect, it can be challenging. In this article, we'll give a detailed overview of the web development process to help you understand what's involved, making it easier for you to approach the project on your own and avoid any pitfalls.
Your Role as the Client
After your design is complete, you'll need to move on to the development stage to bring it to life.
Chances are, you'll be less involved in the development phase and require less collaboration, so your role will be to sit back and relax while the skilled development team does its work.
Depending on the project size, complexity, and project management approach, you may interact with the agency partner throughout the process. If you use an Agile approach, this could include retrospective meetings within the sprint, and if you work differently, it might involve short demos, walkthroughs of specific custom-developed features, or simply giving you a chance to explore various functions as they're being built.
Smooth Handoff from Design to Development
The meeting aims to give developers a full understanding of the site or platform they need to build before they even start work, which reduces the risk of errors and speeds up delivery times.
Every agency will have its own approach to this. Typically, the designer(s) and project manager(s) brief the development team on everything that happened during the design process and explain the reasoning behind the decisions made. They’ll also provide recommendations and tips on how best to approach the design from a development perspective.
Any questions developers have about the task at hand can be addressed during the meeting, as well as at any time throughout the development process, making the project work both efficient and effective.
Benefits of Working with a Full-Service Web Design and Development Agency
It’s crucial to align the work of web designers and developers because there are often fundamental differences in their thinking and approach. If you choose to work with a web design agency for your site’s design and a separate development agency, you may encounter gaps in understanding between these two processes.
Working with a partner agency that has specialists in both disciplines on staff ensures your site will be built on time, within budget, and exactly to your requirements. When designers and developers work in the same team and can share knowledge throughout the process, it almost always leads to a higher-quality project.
Building Your Site
Once the handoff is complete, developers will start building your site.
Most development agencies will likely start by creating the foundation. This includes setting up the site’s base styles, including default colors, typography styles, and global components like button and link styles.
After the foundation is in place, developers typically move on to setting up the navigation and footer, then proceed to build all the page templates and content blocks from the design, if they’re using a block-based approach.
Part of this process often involves integrating certain site components with other systems you use in your business.
Expert Reviews and Testing to Maintain High Performance Standards
It’s important that your agency conducts a review and internal testing of all built elements to identify and address any issues as early as possible.
After this internal QA process, you’ll typically be given a link to your site on a staging environment.
All your content will likely be migrated from your existing site, and redirects should also be set up so that when the site goes live, any old redundant links are redirected to the appropriate page on the new site.
If you’re running any marketing campaigns, it’s important to make sure your development agency and your marketing team (or agency) stay in constant contact beforehand so they can update your campaigns in line with the launch of your new site.