This stage, the stage of discovering and researching, determines how the subsequent steps will look like.  The most important task at this point is to get the clear understanding of you future website purposes, the main goals you wish to achieve, and the target audience you want to attract to your site.  A website development questionnaire helps to develop the best strategy for further project management.

At this stage of the website development cycle, the developer creates the data that can give the customer an opportunity to judge how the entire site will look like.  Site Planning includes the sitemap and wireframes of pages.  Creating the sitemap ensures that you’ve considered all the key pages in the site, showing their relationship to each other and defining how the sites overall navigation should be structured.  Wireframes provide a detailed view of the content that will appear on each page.

During the Design phase, your website takes shape.  All the visual content, such as images, photos, and videos is created at this step.  Once again, all the info that was gathered through the first phase is crucial.  The Customer and target audience must be kept in mind while you work on a design.  The organization’s brand plays an important role this part of the process, as designers will want to visually convey key brand perceptual ideas within the design.

With designs approved, it’s time to flesh out the design of the pages, develop new content and refine old content, create videos, slideshows, podcasts and other media that ill appear on the site as well as start to build out the HTML and CSS of the site.

Before the site is launched, it will be placed on a production server where only internal audiences and anyone who we share the link with can view it.  Testing of the site is critical as there will inevitably be issues that need to be addressed before the site goes live.

The big day.  We’ve tested the site, had it reviewed and approved by the project stakeholders, and you’re ready to launch.  But once the site is launched, the project isn’t over– you should be prepared to address feedback from users adapting to the new site.  Expect to make some immediate changes to the site, such as fixing broken links, editing coy an making adjustments.  The web is a fluid medium that changes on a daily, if not hourly basis — change is inevitable.

Websites are living, breathing entities and need constant care and maintenance.  Updating content, making changes to the backend and fixing broken links are all in a day’s work.  All of these phases are critical to the web design process.