Planning to build a website to support the lead generation and revenue targets of your business? Know that as basic as a website sounds for the digital presence of a brand, it is equally important for reputation and most likely the first point of contact your existing and potential customers will have with your products and services. If you too are navigating the website development process, here is an insider look of how a typical website development company in Dubai executes the project. I have divided the guide in 8 major steps, and wrapped up with a comment on scaling your website business.
1. Website Planning and Discovery
Web development companies typically begin by thoroughly understanding the client’s requirements and objectives in the planning phase. This involves conducting initial consultations to gather information about the business, target audience, and desired functionalities. They define the project scope, timelines, and budget, while also analyzing competitors’ websites to identify areas of opportunity.
Key deliverables of the planning stage include:
- Web development strategy with market research, competitor analysis, timeline, number of pages, technology stack and monetization framework
- project proposal describing the range of perform and estimated charges
- sitemap that lays out the structure and hierarchy of the website for navigation purposes
Web development teams typically have product development strategists that make key contributions during the planning part – especially in business and technical discovery. From here on, they connect with a project manager, who then divides the entire website development scope into workload units called ‘sprints’.
2. Sprint Planning
Sprint planning is basically a method in scrum approach, which is a part of a wider agile development system. For websites, sprints typically last 4 to 6 business days and include development of a page or two. If the website has advanced features, for example AI-based product recommendations, then project managers would dedicate even 9 to 15 sprints to a specific feature.
The sprint planning typically depends on the resources present in the development team, the timeline of the project, the scope, client’s additional requirements and the internal processes of the company.
Most importantly, these sprints help designers, developers and other team members stay laser-focused on development objectives – and so, a project manager:
- initiates each sprint with a sprint plan meeting discussing the targets,
- concludes a sprint with a review meeting to understand what went wrong and what could be improved.
These sprints are communicated to the design and development departments and the technical teams take handovers of the project.
3. Website Design
Moving on to website UI/UX design, a website development company in Dubai would typically start by wireframing and prototyping the layout and user flow using tools like Figma or Adobe XD.
The designers would focus on creating visually appealing interfaces, but all while ensuring a smooth user experience, intuitive navigation and accessibility.
The UI design incorporates:
- brand elements like logo and tagline
- color scheme, style guide
- fonts and typography
The UX design emphasizes:
- Navigation tools like arrows and scroll bars
- Mega menu and sitelinks
- CTAs and buttons
Two deliverables in this phase include interactive prototypes for client review and finalized UI design mockups.
4. Website Content
Content development is a key stage in terms of short and long-term marketing perspectives. During the website development stage, if the businesses perform optimal keyword research and create SEO-based content, there are faster chances for their business to rank online.
Now there are three typical formats of content that go on a website:
Text – these are page descriptions, service offerings, about sections and blog content that are based on terms your customers are using to search for products and services like yours.
Images – these are normal team photos that enhance the visual appeal of the website. Secondly, images become all the more important if you are developing an ecommerce website.
Videos – not mandatory, but if you have a landing page, or a reviews section, it is ideal to post a video or two to humanize your brand.
One more area of content is the legal documentation, which includes privacy policy and terms and conditions of trade. These two documents typically go on the website as disclaimers.
5. Development Execution
This is the key programming stage where the developers use most of the technology stack they decide during the discovery stage. In the development phase, the company brings the design to life by coding the frontend and backend of the website.
Developers convert the UI designs into responsive web pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for frontend development. They execute backend development and build server-side logic and databases using frameworks like Django or Node.js.
To enhance website functionality, reduce load time and improve performance, they integrate plugins and third-party services.
6. Testing and Quality Assurance
App development in dubai company execution is way more authentic than others and their developers forward the first build of the website to the testing department where the analysts perform integration, unit, device and responsiveness tests to ensure the health and performance of the website.
They rigorously assess the website on five fronts: its compatibility with different browsers and devices, functionality of its navigation and access points, security through SSL and encryption, loading speed and time and user experience.
In some cases, they may also ask real users to comment on the experience, gather this feedback and fix areas that need to be. The deliverables of the testing stage include:
- a comprehensive test report detailing issues
- resolutions to fix the issues with members and timelines
The website during this stage is typically ready to be hosted on the search engines.
7. Launch and maintenance
Website developers usually help with setting up the domain, hosting, and deploying the website files to the server.
They perform the final checks to ensure everything on the inside and backend are working correctly.
Depending on the marketing plan of the business, announcements are made through various channels, and the company provides support during the transition.
Businesses can choose to hire web developers for ongoing maintenance and support services, during which they monitor and audit the performance, make updates and add more content.
Scaling A Website-Based Business
If you are a business, your website endeavor doesn’t really conclude at launching and maintenance, with time, your website will have increased traffic and load, and to keep the website running smoothly, you’ll have to gradually scale it in terms of feature, security tools, content, cloud space, hosting and capacity.
