In order to thoroughly plan well and build a website till it becomes operational and useful for your business, several steps must be followed in a systematic way characteristic of many system development methods. The steps should at least include:
Planning Of Your Business Strategy
This should always be the first step because it is the most important. The website you want to build has some expected benefits for your business and these should be examined at this level. That will guide you to have an idea of how much you are supposed to invest approximately. You should involve experts in business analysis and website design to get the right perspective.
Registration of Domain Name
For any business that wants to look big before its potential customers expected to be found online, a domain name is required. This helps to make the business email addresses and website address related and if possible short for customers’ convenience. Most importantly, with your own domain name the website address and email addresses do not change even if you move to different hosting services.
Design Strategy Definition
Think about the roadmap of implementing your business strategies with the website you want to build. Keep in mind the needs of customers so that they will find useful information about your products and services. The right content is more important and the layout should be kept simple. Meta tags and their placement should be defined for search engines to index your website once online. Tools to be used should be selected keeping in mind they should not limit compatibility with browsers or hosting options.
Developing and Testing
At this stage, all the previous planning is now setup on a schedule with well defined targets for the website developers. Changes should be kept at minimal to avoid delays and inconsistencies. Your website is fully designed on your computer or the designer’s computer and tested for compatibility with all major browsers. The loading speed of the website pages is also tested and any changes for improvements done.
Choosing Hosting Plan
With your website ready to go online, you will have the opportunity to choose from a variety of hosting plans. A business website must on a paid hosting service that does not affect your domain name. You may want to consider Unix/Linux hosting platform which is the fastest and supports a wide range of internet standards than Windows NT/2000 hosting. However, it depends on the tools used to develop the website. In-house hosting can also be considered but you would rather concentrate on your core business and worry less.
Ongoing Maintenance