5 Steps of the Custom WordPress Website Development Process

The web development process includes many tasks that can be divided into these steps: project planning, website designing, web development, testing, and launching. The process puts together experts and web professionals to work on a website from start to finish. Having a clear plan of action for developing and designing a website the right way is also good.

Whether you need a small business website or a large site redesign with thousands of products, the web development team should follow a proven website development process to ensure you will get an efficient website that is user- and search-friendly. It will also enable the website development team to stay ahead of the necessary deliverables and assets required to build your new website.

What is a Website Development Process?

If you want to complete a website development project successfully, you need to follow the documented website development process. Using the process provides for coordinating the resources of the project team and stakeholders to deliver all project tasks on time.

First, we’ll talk about the five main steps in the website development process and explain why they’re vital for the website’s success:

Step 1: Information gathering and planning.

The first step of the website development process to design a successful website is to gather information.

A website development team should consider many things to build the look and feel of your website. That is why a web agency representative asks many questions to understand your requirements, needs, and business clearly. Specific things to consider are:

• Project summary:
  The project summary pictures the general overview of the web project, the company’s background, the environment the company exists in, the staff, and the unique values the company or its products provide to its target audience.

• Goals: 
  As a customer, you should define two or three specific, measurable goals the site should achieve. Clear goals allow the website development team to focus on features that will provide the most impact and move the company forward.

• Target audiences: 
  A target audience is a specific group of people that will help a company reach its business and financial goals. That is why defining your ideal customer or target segment is vital. A professional web development team should consider customers’ age, gender, location, and interests to create the best design style for your site.

• Messages: 
  There are two groups of messages you can use on a website. The first group is marketing messages that attract and motivate your target audience to engage with the company and its products or services. The second group is brand messages that differentiate the company from its competitors.

• Competition:
  Who are competitors that offer similar services or products to the market? The website development team should review the websites of competitive companies to analyze marketing and brand messages, usability, call to action, and visual branding. By understanding these facets of competitors’ websites, web designers can strategically design website layouts to provide a superior user experience and more effective design than competitors’ websites.

• Content:
  What kind of information will the potential customers be looking for? Are they looking for features or characteristics of a particular product or service? Your target audience may be looking for some specific information. Could they find the relevant information on your site easily?

Site Architecture

Site architecture consists of the sitemap and wireframes of website pages. The main goal of creating the sitemap is consideration of all website pages and their relationship to each other and define the website navigation. Wireframes do not show any actual UI design elements, but they provide a detailed view of the content and define the content hierarchy on each page.

The other important thing is to select the technology stack – programming language, frameworks, CMS, and plugins that you’re going to use.

Step 2: Design

At this step of the website development process, web designers use gathered information to determine the look and feel of the site. One of the most used web design tools is Figma.

One of the critical factors that website designers should consider is the target audience. If a site is designed for young adults, it will look much different than one for a financial company. Also, web designers should use the company’s brand elements, such as the logo and colors, to help strengthen the company’s identity.

Step 3: The website coding

At this step, the website developers create a functional website.

The web developer creates a custom WordPress theme coded specifically for that created design. Then the web developers code the website functionality, decent admin panel, and UI animations. It also includes mobile responsive views to make a site accessible to audiences that use different mobile devices.

Once the web developers have developed the WordPress theme and page templates, the content can be taken and distributed throughout appropriate pages on the website.

Step 4: Testing

At this stage of the website development process, the web team should attend to the final details and test the website.

Usually, web testers or QA engineers review and test the complete functionality of forms, buttons other features like shopping carts or email software. Also, web testers should test that website is displayed correctly in different browsers and mobile devices.

Step 5: Delivery

Once the team of web developers receives final approval from the customer, it is time to deliver the website. It means migration of the files to the customer’s server. A website launching also involves updating the set of plugins, basic SEO configuration, setting redirects, doing website backup, adding web tracking scripts, CMS and admin panel training, and referencing access to the website. Here web testers should test the website again to ensure that all things work correctly and visitors can use the site functionality.

It marks the launch of the website, and the website is accessible to users now.

Conclusions

Well, the site was launched. It works excellently, attracts valuable traffic, and generates leads or purchases. Is it enough to aim for business goals? Launching any website is a big step, but it’s only the first of many if you want your traffic and sales to skyrocket.

The web is a dynamic environment. Your competitors can also refresh their sites, improve the content, and run marketing campaigns, and new companies may appear in your niche.

What should you do? There are many things that digital marketers suggest:

• Promote your new site on social media to increase your online presence with Social Media Marketing
• You can also increase your online presence with crowd marketing
• Constantly optimize your site for search engines because a web search is dynamic
• Continually improve your content and develop new content ideas with content marketing
• Run an online advertising campaign with professional PPC services
• Manage your online reputation
• Analyze user engagement reports and improve the conversion rate on your site
• Request website support and maintenance services to update WordPress, and plugins, fix bugs, add functionality, and protect your site against hackers and malware.

Keep in mind that the website development project doesn’t start with coding page templates and doesn’t end after the day your website is launched. Proven web specialists and professionals will help your website succeed in the shortest term without extra cost.