It is a no-brainer that if you have a business in today’s world then you need a website for it to succeed. No matter how small or big your business is, you need to have a website to be able to reach your maximum potential. This is where website development companies step in.
A website development company helps you in the website-building process for your business. However, before you approach a development company, you need to understand how a development process works and what a development company does for you. Doing so would allow you to navigate better and have a fruitful process.
Before we go about discussing what website development does, let’s first get it out of the way why you must hire a development company for building your website-
Why Hire a Website Development Company?
Having a web development company helping you through the process of website building can make a world of a difference. You get to work with professionals who have years of experience in the field and have the technical expertise to ensure you get a successful product in the end. Here are some of how hiring a website development company can make your life easier-
- Offers Uniqueness.
Having a website development company ensures that you get a unique product in the end. Having worked with multiple clients and creating hundreds of websites, the developer understands how it’s important for every business to have a website that’s unique in its way and is a representation of the brand. The experts at these development companies work closely with you to understand what your business stands for and incorporate that idea into your website to create something special and personalized just for you.
It also allows you to go ahead with quick and easy updates of all the content and images on the website. Having a professional development company doing all the work for you takes the burden of planning, designing, and developing a website away from your shoulders.
- Will save you time.
Having to develop a website on your own is possible, but it can be quite time-consuming. If you do not have a development team at hand, then the entire workload would be on you which doesn’t leave you with the time to focus on other avenues of your business.
If you take the task of developing a website on your own then you’d be required to start from the very beginning and take care of each phase such as planning, designing, and execution on your own. Doing all this requires knowledge and although you can learn using YouTube or use a website builder, still, it is more time taking then hiring a development company to do all the work for you.
Related: Hiring a Web Designer or Using a Website Builder? (esearchlogix.com)
- More secure & stable website.
Even if you learn to create a website using hundreds of tutorials online, you still lack the knowledge and expertise one needs to ensure that all your data is secure, and your website isn’t going to crash the very second it launched.
When it comes to website development, there are a lot of things that need to keep in mind. You need to make sure that your website is secure and follows all the precautionary measures so that it’s safe from malicious attacks such as hacking. You need to ensure your users as well as your data don’t go into the wrong hands. Also, you need to have precautionary measures in place in case of an attack.
Here, having a website developer takes away all the worry about the security and stability of a website. The development experts have years of experience creating secure websites and are well versed with all the new updates & information around the same.
- Elegant & responsive design.
The way you design your website sets the foundation for the entire development process. Audiences know your brand from how your website looks, it creates a perception of your brand in the minds of your audiences, this is why there is so much emphasis on the designing process and a huge chunk of time for any development is given to this process.
You need to ensure that your designs sing about your brand image and give a pleasant introduction to the audience. But it’s not just limited to this. You also need to ensure all the elements on your website are placed elegantly and create a seamless navigational experience for your audience. Also, your design needs to be responsive as a lot of people nowadays access websites through different devices such as mobile phones, desktops, tablets, etc., so you need to make sure that your website design is responsive to each and every design.
We know this look quite daunting, and this is why having a development team makes the job easy, as they have a team of designers that are trained to do this job alone.
- Faster load time.
If you’re building a website with your limited expertise, it’s sure to be heavier and you wouldn’t know how to optimize different elements to make it load faster. Building a website in itself is a strenuous task, and we’re sure you’re bound to miss something, which would result in your website load time suffering which is something you can’t afford.
A website’s load time is one of the major factors that Google considers before ranking it on its search engine results pages (SERPs). Google wants to provide the best experience to its users and ranking a website that takes too much time to load, would most definitely frustrate the users. Also, if the audience gets impatient with the slow-loading website, then they can click on the back button or leave the web page altogether which would affect your bounce rate.
This is why hiring a development company would help you create a fast website that’s optimized for all such scenarios.
Now that we’ve why you need to hire a website development company to build your website, let’s focus on understanding what a website development company does and what you need to do to get the maximum benefit out of this transaction.
Understanding How a Website Development Company Creates Magic
We are living in a world that’s predominantly surviving online. Over the years, we’ve seen the power internet holds over us and how it can make our lives easier. Now we have websites for every business, no matter how big or small, and these websites are created by Developers who are trained for the job.
A website development company works to take the burden of creating a website away from your shoulders. Let’s see how!
Who makes these websites?
You’d be surprised to know that at some point or other a lot of people have tried to build websites on their own. There are a lot of tools out there that also help you with the process, and you can always learn to build one from scratch by following YouTube tutorials and such. But there’s always a risk factor involved in building a website on your own. This is where a website development company helps.
A development company is built of people who are trained to do this job. It consists of team managers, web designers, coders, software engineers, and developers, who are professionals and worked years to hone their skills and work with the customers to build an end product (website) that’s an embodiment of their brand and what their business stands for.
What a Website Development Company does?
The main scope of a website development company includes ideation, development, and maintenance of a website. These three tasks are divided into 7 progressive phases of website development-
- Research and Analysis
The first stage of website development starts with research and analysis of the idea scope and the concept around which the website is to be built. With the amount of competition that’s out there in the market, it’s essential that you get the brand message and audience segment right and gives enough time and attention to the research & analysis phase.
Doing market research right helps the development team to create a blueprint for the website. It allows the development team to analyze the existing market to set up goals for the website and understand what’s the requirement of the entire process. It allows one to clarify the vision and set up achievable goals for the developers.
- Planning & Strategy
Once you’re done finalizing the goals and requirements for the development process, you can finally approach the planning and strategizing to achieve those goals within the set deadline. If you do not have a definite plan, then the development team wouldn’t be able to coordinate well and finish their work within the set period.
Having a certain plan and strategy in place allows you to make all the timelines and deliverables clear. You also need to make sure you have the estimation for resources right in the strategizing phase and make sure it’s been allocated to the right people. And once you’ve set these things in place, you can finally set the project in motion.
- Designing
Once you’re done planning and strategizing how the whole development process is going to go, now it’s finally time for you to create a wireframe for your website that fits the vision you’ve set. It’s equally important to invest as much time & effort in the designing phase of a development process. It’s equal to or more important than the back-end process with the database and servers themselves.
In this process, the front-end development team or the designing team creates a visual wireframe for the site and works on the elements that can fit into this framework to create a complete web layout for the site interface. It’s also essential that the front-end development team pay special attention to things like typography, icons, organization of elements, spaces, content placement, etc., to bring the whole wireframe together.
- Content Creation
The content works as the body of your website. So, once you’ve created a wireframe and have finally all the design elements for your site, you have to move on to the content creation phase next to ensure your website has quality content along with extraordinarily designed elements.
The development team can work in collaboration with content strategists and writers for content creation of elements such as graphics, pictures, descriptions, and the main body of the content. You need to publish content that explains the features and goals of your site in a very attractive, easy, and relatable manner. You can also involve a UX designer to have the content aligned with the approach that’s been used to design the UX flow.
Finally, with the content creation done, you now have a thread to connect the design elements to the user interface and develop a seamless experience for your users.
- Coding & Development
Till now we’ve dealt with the planning & visualization phases of the website development process. But now it’s time to delve into the coding & development side of things. In this phase, we deal with the full-stack development services where the actual coding and programming take place for the website.
Here, the developers take time to create a site from the scratch with the help of front-end technologies (such as CSS, JavaScript, HTML), Backend Languages (such as Java, PHP, C#), Libraries & frameworks, Databases, Web architecture, and more.
- Testing & Quality Assurance
Once the site has been developed, it needs to go for testing and quality check before being launched. This is a very important phase of the process as it helps the developers understand how the product that they’ve created is going to work and whether it needs some tweaking or changes.
The testing phase of the process takes care of the quality checks and corrections in the framework to produce a high-performance and complete website interface. There are a lot of tests that the team has to run such as unit tests, stress tests, loading tests, and more to check the app’s efficiency and how it would work in real-life scenarios. In this testing phase, the developers get to know their mistakes and they can work on rectifying them before finally deploying the site for large-scale use.
- Deployment & Maintenance
Once the testing and quality assurance phase of the development process is complete, the site is finally deployed in different customer segments and monitored for its performance. In this phase, the real test of the final product begins where the development team monitors how people are reacting to their creation and whether it completed the goal it had set out to achieve in the research & analysis phase.
The development team constantly monitors the usage pattern of the site to see how the user base is interacting with it. They also take customer feedback to see the issues and work on resolving them to the best of their capabilities. Once it’s been launched, the site needs timely maintenance to perform seamlessly throughout.
We recommend you hire a reputed and experienced web development company to take you through the full stack development process and who can build a unique & exceptional website for your business.
Website Development Services
As we already know, even though there are millions of websites online, all of them are unique in their way and follow different styles and sizes. This is where a website development company can help you by building a customized website to match the unique needs & preferences of your business.
Similarly, all the websites built over the last decade need to keep a mobile-first approach. This means that whatever type of website you’re building needs to be responsive on different devices such as desktops, mobile phones, tablets, and more.
Now, the approach that a website development company would take to build your business website depends on a lot of factors such as:
- What type of business do you run? (Whether it’s B2B or B2C)
- What industry or domain do you operate in?
- What geographic & demographics do you cater to?
- What is your budget for the development and maintenance of the website?
- What are your short-term & long-term goals for the website?
Here are some of the activities that a web development company helps with-
- It helps you with finalizing an idea, framework, architecture, and navigation.
- You can get help with what language to choose to code your site with such as JavaScript, HTML, PHP, .NET, Laravel, etc.
- It helps with coding and programming the back end of your site.
- It helps with integrating media elements such as videos, images, audio, and more.
- It helps with publishing the content and making adjustments according to the best practices.
- It helps you with front-end elements such as designing the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX).
- A web development company can help you with testing the site (such as testing on the staging server, and beta testing) before it goes live.
- It helps identify the problems and fix all the bugs.
- It helps with conducting performance and speed testing.
- Finally, with implementing all the codes and going live.
- The task of maintaining and updating the site also is handled by the development company.
The process of developing a website depends on a lot of factors, most of which can be handled by a web development company. Some of these companies even give you the service of helping with the research and ideation process and then the site can be developed using a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and more.
In simple terms, a website development company helps its customers develop a unique website from start to finish.
Conclusion
Be sure to choose a development company that can help you with the development process from the beginning till the very end. You can ask these questions to choose the right developer or development company: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Website Development Agency or Developer (esearchlogix.com)
eSearch Logix has years of experience working with businesses of all sizes. We have a team of skilled developers, web designers, and programmers who will help you every step of the way.
