Making a website for your portfolio or your audience is a lengthy process. There are several things you need to keep in mind to ensure that your work is flawless. Planning and jotting down everything you need to do will help you. After every step, you can check if you have missed something. It is also unlikely that you will skip a step by mistake if you have a plan in front of you.
Here is how you should make a web development plan yourself or else you may also hire a web developer freelance to prepare the plan for you:
Decide Why You are Making the Website: The most crucial thing for you to decide is the purpose of your website. Is it to sell your products online? Will it showcase your business portfolio? Are you working for a specific firm or enterprise? Answering these questions will help you figure out everything you need to put on your site. For instance, if it is your first website ever, you should try to work with everything you have learned so far to consolidate your knowledge. It does not matter if the site is too full of features because you are only doing it as part of your learning. But if you are working for a firm, they will likely have some ideas in mind or at least a project for which they need it. In that case, you have to build it with only those features that are necessary for the project.
Determine Your Target Audience: Your target audience is an integral part of your website. Knowing that will help you work on your user interface and user experience design. If your target audience caters to a certain age group or a certain category of people, you need to make your design in a way that it appeals to them in particular. If it is a general website, you should go with designs that people generally like and are comfortable using.
Create a Wireframe: Once you have determined the purpose and targeted audience of your website, it is time for you to create a wireframe. A wireframe is nothing but a blueprint of your website. With it, you can understand the basic structure of all the pages in your site and how you will layout the content. It will also help you understand how functional your pages will be for your users. Creating a wireframe before adding content or finalizing the design of the site will help you determine any errors or pitfalls that you can avoid later on.
Follow the MVC Pattern: Following the MVC pattern will help in the coding process. The Model-view-controller pattern is a way in which codes are organized based on their purpose. Each section of code has a different purpose, like controlling the functions of your website, storing data, among other things. It essentially aims to organize your codes in a way that they are easy to workable. When your codes are separate from one another, it is easy to fix problems in them as well. It is because when you determine what the problem is, you will also know which codes to fix and will be able to locate them easily. It makes the web development process clean and manageable.
Work on Your Database: The database ensures the efficiency and performance of your website. Ideally, a database should divide all the website information into subject-based tables. It should also help to bring together the information on the different tables. It should accommodate all your requirements for data processing and reporting. Create your database in the subject-based table structure. Separate information and store them in different tables. Choose a primary key for each table to identify each row. Determine the relationship and create links between the different tables. Check whether there are errors in your design. Finally, apply data normalization rules to see whether you have structured the tables in the correct order.
Add Features: Add as many features as you need to on your website. Remember that a professional website has a clean finish. While previously, users like to see more new and interesting features on a website, now the trend is towards minimalism. Too many features confuse the users and fail to capture their interests. So you must add features only when you feel that they are necessary and you cannot do without them. Also, try to keep each element simple and accessible to your users, so it does not take long to locate them.
Perform Unit Test and User Acceptance Test: Performing unit tests is all about testing individual modules to detect issues in the design. Each unit of the system is tested individually for errors and fixed immediately. Doing so in the early phase of the development helps to reduce the cost of testing significantly. It reduces defects and bugs in the existing features. It also helps to establish website quality. Unit tests should be integrated into the website. Similar to unit tests, you should also perform user acceptance tests before releasing your website. Test your website in real-world scenarios or release a version that your users can test. With their valuable feedback, you can find out if they like your site, or you need to make changes before the final release.
Release Your Website and Perform Bug Fixes: The last and final step is to release your website. Once you have checked everything and are sure about your work, it is time for you to release it. You should know that bugs may affect your site from time to time. You must troubleshoot and check it at regular intervals and perform bug fixes with every new release.
So this brings us to an end to all the steps that must be followed while preparing a web development plan. Further read about, Top Reactive Programming Interview Questions for 2020. Hope this article was helpful.
