Understanding Website Development
Discover everything you need to know about web development for small businesses and authors, from costs and methodologies to best practices and the design process.
- Author Branding
- July 18, 2024
Small businesses and authors need websites to engage with their target audiences more now than ever. Although 71% of companies had a site in 2023, only 21% of small businesses have enough website traffic. 85% of Indie authors (writers who have published using alternative methods than traditional publishing houses) also have a website, while almost 46% of the remaining authors who do not have a site plan to have one within a year.
Companies and authors that wish to create a new site or redesign an existing one must understand how complex website development can be (which results in 30% of authors hiring a third-party freelancer or company to build their site). Our journey begins here: equipping you with the necessary knowledge and tools to design and develop (or decide to hire someone to complete the project for you) a responsive and engaging website for your target audience.
What is Website Development?
To help small businesses and authors understand the significance of website development, it is essential to start by defining and distinguishing the individuals or companies involved in designing a website’s infrastructure’s customer-facing and back-end development.
Website development is a complex process that involves various tasks and processes, including project design, layout, coding, content creation, and functionality, to visualize, create, design, and populate a brand-new or redesigned site. The good news is that you have options: you can either make the website in-house or hire a third-party company or freelancer to create it for you.
There are two primary jobs for website development: web designers and web developers. A web developer works behind the scenes using special programming codes and languages to ensure the website works properly and builds the infrastructure from the ground up. A web designer creates and manages everything a user sees on a website, collaborating directly with clients to develop designs and turn concepts into visual realities.
Web Developers
Small businesses and authors must understand which type of web developer (front-end, back-end, or full-stack) they want to use, as each performs different tasks and often uses different coding languages. Front-end developers (see more details below) concentrate on the website’s visual aspects, such as navigation and graphics. Back-end developers focus on the infrastructure and programs that will help support the front end. Full-stack developers take care of the entire project from beginning to end (although this rarely happens).
- Front-End Developer. A front-end developer focuses on the client side of the website, using programming languages such as JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, and React to enable customers to interact with and view the site.
- Back-End Developer. A back-end developer concentrates on writing code (using programming languages like Python, C++, Perl, Ruby, and Kotlin) to manage servers, process user inputs, standardize server and network configurations, create a content management system for organizing data, and design the digital infrastructure.
- Full-Stack Developer. A full-stack developer handles both the front-end and back-end aspects of website development. They work with a combination of different technologies, known as a tech stack, to manage various functions on a website. This includes servers, APIs, databases, operating systems, security, content, and site architecture. Full-stack developers must be proficient in coding languages for front-end and back-end design.
Web Designers
Web designers have two primary responsibilities: designing the visual aspects of a website from scratch or updating an existing site to reflect the latest information. As specialists in UI (user interface) and UX (user experience), a web designer will:
- Craft an immersive and user-friendly site for effortless navigation.
- Drive the implementation of vital search engine optimization (SEO) elements in strategic locations (including meta tags, high-quality content, descriptive and informative links and headings, clear alt text descriptions, sitemaps, etc.) to guarantee search engine visibility.
- Integrate compelling graphics and images.
- Strategically employ layouts to figure out the best placement of information.
- Streamline the organization of website materials.
- Tailor each web page and map out their connections thoughtfully.
A web designer manages distinct types of elements during their design or update, including visual and functional components.
Visual Elements
A web designer encapsulates and displays a company's identity, values, and offerings and translates that information into visual form. As decided during brand development, the visual elements on a website include coloring, fonts, images, icons, layout, logos, and video.
Functional Elements
The web designer enhances customer interaction by ensuring the following: (1) navigation is easy to understand and use; (2) avoiding unnecessary pop-ups or videos to prevent information overload for customers; (3) ensuring each web page has short loading times; (4) applying SEO to each page so web crawlers can find the site; and (5) allowing customers to engage with the site using a range of devices, such as computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
Reasons to Have a Website for Your Business
Before I opened my own business, I often heard that creating a website would be expensive, difficult to support, and not worth the effort. However, I am glad I disregarded those negative thoughts and opinions, as my company would not exist otherwise.
I acknowledge that having a website can sometimes be costly and frustrating. However, the pride in designing something myself and the opportunity for others to see and read my views make it worthwhile. Despite my first reservations, I now believe that having a company website is one of the best investments any business, regardless of size, can make.
In addition to the feeling of accomplishment described above, there are other valid reasons for small companies and authors to create a new site or redesign their existing website, such as:
Create a Professional Brand Image
In today’s digital world, a well-designed website that accurately reflects your company's identity and values and succinctly shows how you can help the customer solve a problem is crucial. Customers view your firm more seriously than competitor sites with inconsistencies, misspelled wording, and slow loading times.
Enables a more in-depth view of your products and services
Social media platforms are great for helping companies spread the word about what they are offering to customers. However, having a website that provides in-depth information about your products and services allows customers to make informed decisions and compare your offerings to the competition. Companies that provide little to no info have more difficulty attracting customers and affecting the marketplace with their offerings.
Facilitates Greater Competition
In the real world or business, someone will always be offering a better deal or increased benefits than someone else. Finding businesses that can help you solve a problem, provide the products and services you are looking for at a reasonable price, and communicate with you on a more personal yet professional level makes it easier to decide which company to hire.
Higher Exposure to a Broader Audience
Customers searching for an answer to their pain points can access millions of alternatives. By narrowing your message to a specific target audience, you have a much higher chance of reaching those potential customers when they complete online research.
Best Practices for Website Development
Although Atwood LLC plans to discuss this issue in-depth in upcoming brand development blogs, we briefly evaluate standard best practices (or the most sensible guidelines to follow as regulated (or normalized) by others in the industry) for designing your firm’s site.
Web Development Best Practices
An industry’s formal and informal best practices are actions (such as designing business processes) that typically follow a similar pattern across companies. This results in the most effective ways to garner positive organizational results. Companies should always learn which best practices they must follow legally and which they can either alter to suit their needs better or borrow from other industries.
During the web development process, associations and companies within the industry have created a list of best practices they have found to be effective. Shared best practices to follow during the web development process include (but are not limited to):
- Code smarter. Use the most suitable coding language for the specific area of the website being designed. Find the most efficient methods to help the company achieve its goals and apply the coding language that best fits the task. This also requires streamlining the sometimes-redundant steps a user may need to take to create a more direct and intuitive process.
- Follow Standards. Ensure you understand your industry’s legal and recommended best practices and create documentation clarifying your company’s standards. Include the standards for both front-end and back-end scripting. This will help everyone involved in the development and design process, as well as those who check and update the website within the organization, to know what is and is not acceptable to use or do.
- Link to social media platforms. Create a strategy for connecting to your target audience and supply the connections on your website to each platform for easy access (and vice versa from your social media pages to the website).
- Planning.Planning your website involves several steps. First, you need to set goals and devise a strategy for reaching them. Next, you must create a budget and research other websites, looking at their design, color schemes, typography, navigation, and standard page layouts. Finally, you must decide which pages are essential for your website, such as legal disclosures, and which can provide more information about your products or services.
- Use the most relevant and efficient tech stack to improve future scalability. Creating an architecture divided into smaller standalone functions makes scaling an individual service more accessible and independent of the other connected systems.
Web Design Best Practices
Best practices for the front-end design process concern how the company or author plans to present themselves to the target audience and how the customer will use and interact with the site.
The standard best practices every company should apply to their site include:
- Accessibility. Ensuring the website is accessible to individuals with disabilities by writing code or using plugins (or small bits of coded software) to make the site more perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all users.
- Consistency. Developers should design the website with a similar look and feel across all pages, even when creating different layouts for specific page types (such as service pages, FAQs, secondary and tertiary level pages within the navigational hierarchy, resource pages, and blogs).
- Conventionalism. Although companies and authors can design the website as they please, it is beneficial to ensure that elements such as logos and navigation are in the “traditional” places (header and footer) and are clearly functional.
- Navigability. Developers aim to create website navigation that is both simple and intuitive. This involves placing navigation menus at the header and footer of the page, incorporating a search bar for specific queries, and using breadcrumbs to help users remember their navigation path. By implementing these strategies, developers can design websites that ease quick and easy access to desired information for users.
- Responsive. With over 60% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, companies and authors need to ensure customers can use any device and still have an informative and pleasant experience on their site.
- Simple. Ensure the website includes only necessary features and information, avoiding overwhelming the user with unnecessary elements.
- User-centricity. Understanding, redesigning, and implementing changes based on user feedback and testing ensures that your site will remain flexible and in tune with customer expectations.
- Visual Hierarchy. Developers should organize similar elements to ensure the most valuable information is easily found. One way to do this is by using the parent-child hierarchy method. In this method, the parent page serves as the main page for a section, and the child pages (or categories and sub-categories) are nested within the parent page. Users can see the hierarchy and access other related pages When they click on the arrow next to a specific topic.
Development Methodologies
The website development process is complex, and your firm’s approach to the project will differ based on many factors. The typical stages include gathering data, planning, designing, content creation, ensuring functionality, testing, launching, monitoring, and updating.
Over the years, website development methodologies have been designed to help make the process more manageable. Small businesses and authors might prefer the traditional method over the methodologies based on their complexity and requirements, intending to adopt one later during a redesign.
Seven of the most popular website development methods include (1) Agile, (2) Dynamic Systems, (3) Extreme Programming, (4) Kanban, (5) Lean, (6) Scrum, or (7) Waterfall. Each method has differing principles, values, and applications. Companies and authors must consider which method best aligns with their goals.
- Agile development is a widely used project management approach for complex or uncertain project requirements. It involves breaking the project into distinct phases or stages, prioritizing continuous collaboration and improvement, and following a cyclical process of planning, execution, and evaluation. To conduct the project, teams work in sprints, typically 2–3-week time limits, to complete assigned tasks within the set timeline. If a task is not finished within the sprint period, it is automatically moved to the next sprint until completion. The team then reviews all completed tasks and plans for the upcoming sprint.
- Dynamic Systems Development Method is another agile method that focuses on the full project lifecycle. To ensure the project aligns with strategic goals, the team follows a phased approach to completion and focuses on helping people work together. This method prominently features best practices for each phase, ensuring on-time and on-budget delivery of the final product.
- Extreme programming focuses on remaining responsive to ever-changing customer requirements. It relies on speed and simplicity, uses short development cycles, and creates less documentation than other methods. However, the requirements that engineers must follow are much stricter than those of different methodologies.
- The Kanban development method uses a visual workflow framework to ensure everyone knows what is happening and when it is due. It enables real-time communication among team members. An excellent example of a Kanban system is Trello, which employs a series of boards and cards to visualize the project in stages from start to finish. As each card progresses through the process, it is moved to the next board until completion. If bottlenecks are found, then improving or removing those bottlenecks can occur in real-time.
- Lean development minimizes waste and focuses on efficiency in the development process. Team members cut waste from a project by removing anything that does not add value, ensuring quality is built-in at each level, promoting collaboration between team members, and using feedback from varying sources to find strategies for efficiency improvement.
- In Scrum development, the earlier sprints are detailed, and roles are assigned to team members to help them self-organize and work towards a common goal. Scrum uses artifacts (tools used to solve problems and manage projects) and events (sequential meetings) to design, develop, assess, and review each project iteration.
- Waterfall development is the “traditional” workflow where each phase cascades sequentially through five stages: requirements, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance.
Costs & Trends in Website Development
When small businesses or authors consider launching a new or redesigned website, a significant consideration is cost. Depending on the specific requirements, whether the company or author hires a third-party developer, and the type of site, the overall costs can vary between $30 and $15,000+. Below, we briefly evaluate the range of costs a business or author will face during development. We will also give a brief overview of the current design trends companies choose to adopt to attract and engage their target audience.
Costs to Build a Website & Upgrade
Small businesses and authors must know the cost of creating a new website or upgrading an existing one. Of course, the larger the expected site, the more expensive it will be. The graphic below outlines the costs a business or author can expect to address.
Apart from the items listed above, it is essential to consider other costs, which can vary in pricing. These costs encompass add-ons, plugins, deciding whether to hire a webmaster, images, and advanced search engine optimization (SEO). Additionally, small businesses may incur an average annual maintenance cost of up to $1,200.
Website Development Trends
In addition to the required pages and content focusing on the target audience, companies should consider upgrading (or updating) the site to include emerging and current web design trends. Of course, the trends in the graphic below typically go against the “traditional” ways a website looks. Still, companies that want to make a statement about who they are and where they plan to go should consider including them to make the firm unique in the eyes of the consumer.
Website Development Process
Small businesses and authors might create websites without fully implementing one of the earlier methodologies. Instead, they could use a combination of different project management programs, such as Trello or ClickUp, to keep track of the project’s progress. This approach offers flexibility and enables all parties to collaborate using various programs for different purposes. Additionally, it allows companies to connect programs using APIs.
The stages of website development typically follow the following pattern: (1) defining your website’s purpose and goals, (2) completing research and planning, (3) creating a domain name and finding a web host, (4) designing the website, (5) developing the content for the site, (6) testing the site to find and eliminate flaws, (7) launch the site, and (8) complete routine maintenance and updates.
- Purpose & Goals. Consider your website’s purpose and long-term goals, just like you would for your business. Clearly explain the purpose of your site and how you plan to achieve your vision. This will help keep your future goals in mind throughout the project. Additionally, create a sitemap to list essential pages and their connections. Lastly, make wireframes for distinct types of pages (home, services, FAQs, etc.) to illustrate the layout of different elements on different devices.
- Research & Planning. One fantastic way to gather visual ideas for your company’s website is to create an idea wall on Pinterest. This wall can include everything from color schemes to typography ideas. As you browse online or within Pinterest, save the things you like to the idea wall for future reference. Additionally, conduct background research on the information or elements that should always be present on your site and understand the reasons for including each element. Take note of best practices and see if any current trends align with your company’s vision for the website.
- Domain Name & Website Hosting. Using your company name, create a list of possibilities for your URL. Then, complete research to learn if the URL is available. If so, pay for the domain name (and be prepared to update that domain each year as necessary). Finally, decide which hosting platform your website will appear on and register your domain on the hosting platform after deciding which plan to buy.
- Website Design. You can build your design team in-house by selecting individuals from different departments or hire a third-party developer and designer to create your website. It is vital that whoever you hire understands your needs and requirements completely. Be open to recommendations during the process, as there may be unexpected difficulties or complications that require adjustments to the site’s format or elements.
- Content Development. When creating content for your website, keep your target audience in mind. This includes everything from alternative text for images to product and service descriptions. Ensure that you thoroughly edit and proofread all the content. Also, incorporate SEO information into your headlines and metadata.
- Website Testing. Take time away from the website before sitting down and testing everything on the site, from the buttons to internal and external links. Ensure the website appears as you wish on the desktop, tablet, and mobile applications. And assume a customer’s mindset when entering the website from different entry points. Ask yourself the following questions: How easily can you find the information, does each step make sense, and does anything appear to be missing that could affect the customer experience?
- Website Launch. Once testing is complete, launch your site to go live for your target audience. Then, begin marketing your new or updated website on social media, targeting relevant hashtags.
- Maintenance & Updates. Over time, make sure to regularly update the information on your site. This will help prevent any broken internal or external links, ensure that the site loads within the recommended time, and ensure that all add-ons and plugins are up to date. It is also important to update the pages or information on your site based on customer feedback to support a consistent yet engaging user experience.
A final Word
Small businesses and authors can create new websites or update their existing ones. They can either build an in-house team to complete the process or hire a third-party freelancer or company. Following best practices to enhance the customer experience, remove unnecessary elements, and use the design team to create a visually appealing and intuitive site is essential. It is worth noting that the larger the site, the more expensive it will be to design. However, the long-term benefits your company will receive will outweigh any frustrations you may meet. Trust me.
Until next time.
