subject: Life Cycle of Website Development [print this page] Life Cycle of Website Development Life Cycle of Website Development
The process of website development can be divided into different life cycle steps. The Website Development Life Cycle framework provides a cycle of actions for system designers and system developers to follow. This life cycle helps to co-ordinate the team effectively and the standards and procedures can be adopted to achieve maximum quality.
A website can be developed with certain methods and standards which fulfills the needs of development team. The steps involved in website development process are:-
1. Website Requirements and Analysis: The first step towards website development is doing preliminary requirement analysis. Analysis should cover all aspects regarding how the website will join the existing system, how it will help business and the present system. You also need to determine that exactly who your targeted audiences are. To determine these things is very important while developing your business requirements and analysis as this is the foundation of your website. The analysis should be done in less time and should provide all necessary information so as to know all requirements of the client based on what all functionalities of the website can be written.
2. Specifications of Requirements: Initial specifications are known by covering up all the elements of the requirements. Each and every modules of the website like general layout of the site, site navigation, dynamic parts of the website and other important specifications should be known. After knowing them a written document should be prepared which acts like a proposal including responsibilities, time-lines and costs.
3. Website Structure and Design: Before starting to build a website it is very necessary to plan the basic structure and design of the website. A rough design should be prepared first and proper analysis of that design should be done. Each and every small issues related to the design of the website should be planned. Throughout the design phase the team should develop test plans and procedures for the purpose of quality assurance as it is necessary to get clients approval on design and project plans. Website structure which includes planning related to the database structure should also be done. Now we have the structure of the website and database planned out so we are ready to develop the website now.
4. Website Construction: The Website structure and design developed in step 3 should be considered and construction of the website should be started matching the requirements which were discovered in step 1. In this section designers and programmers are involved to add their codes according to the design, navigation and requirements of functionalities. They are also responsible to develop necessary testing plans and technical documentation.
5. Marketing: Now you have a well-designed, functional, well-planned and well-structured website, so the next step is marketing that website so that people are able to find it in World Wide Web. It should be well optimized for search engines by using heading tags, bold tags, placing targeted keywords, using alt tags, etc. Submissions of URL should be done to the search engines and directories for website promotion and for better search engine rankings.
6. Analysis of Statistics and Maintenance: At this stage it is necessary to look at statistics of website which is done by knowing how well it is getting targeted traffic and is it converting well. Also maintenance is very important which means websites should be updated frequently to keep them fresh always. Activities involved in maintenance are fixing bugs, ongoing promotions, technical maintenance, content management and updating, site visit activity reports, etc.
So these are the basic steps involved in Website Development Process.
