Web Site or Web Application development – The life Cycle:

Traditionally we follow Software development Life Cycle (SDLC) for developments in IT industry similarly we have website or Application development process to maintain standards, modulate the project technicalities and stringent timelines to achieve success. In this article I will explain different standard steps to follow and achieve objective of the project though it may varies from site to site, application to application and company to company. Similar to SDLC steps web application has steps to fulfill the standards.

The following are the steps:

• Requirement Analysis
• Specification Collection
• Design and Development
• Coding and content
• Testing
• Promotions (Social network setup and Basic SEO)
• Maintenance and updates

Requirement Analysis:

Based on the client requirement, needs and nature of business or service, the requirement analysis is initiated. The primary requirements provided by the client, help to get the model sites & competitor sites which helps to understand how best the website has to design and target the targeted audience to ultimately increase the web traffic.

The technical requirement analysis will cover hardware and software requirements, like the platform to use for web application based on the client’s requirement. Example   a financial web application needs security, efficient database support, speed and present technology like WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), for these requirements we recommend like DotNet platform. A news website with daily updates will suites a CMS (Content Management System), because of daily updates the client should have a provision to update the content without touching the code. The other aspect is cost, we have paid services and open source, based on the requirement and the software analysis we can opt the option.

Things we do:- Requirement Analysis with client(Calls or Go to Meetings), Supporting  information, document sharing through mails, Discussion notes, Online chats and recordings, model sites/applications  list.

Things we decide: – Hardware/Software requirement, Work flows, Team requirements & responsibilities, supporting documentation in order, and final approval.

Specification Collection:

Next step to the  requirement analysis will be the base for specification collection, the decided elements will be elaborated as specifications, example the project is a web site then the template model or layout color schema, preferred colors, fonts, navigation and dynamic part of the website n etc these all will come under the specifications. Huge projects need further level of consultation to predict or plan the additional business logic and technical requirements.

A cycle of creating, reviewing and approving the individual elements spec document, can conclude the outlines of the project scope, responsibilities of the team, time lines and costing.

The other word wireframe a graphical representation of the specifications, like design layout, navigation and technical page flow.

Things as input:-Reports from the requirement analysis team.

Things as Output:-Complete Specifications to individuals of the team, and to Client.

Design and Development:

After completing the specifications phase then the process will be divided into design part and development part, primarily a graphic designer or a web designer will prepare a mockup or a template for the project based on the inputs from the specification document, after number of reviews and changes the layout will be approved, typically a PSD (Photoshop document) will be created.

Simultaneously the sitemap for the site, relationships and interactions between pages, entity relationship models (like tables, attributes, relationships) indentifying main sections of pages, design classes (Object oriented programming) are created.

The .PSD template files may varies two or three based on the requirement, like a HOME page, an inner page template (two column or three), and sub inner page template. These PSDs will be converted to HTML with external CSS, example using adobe Dreamweaver the DWTs (Dreamweaver template) will be created using PSD templates, and using adobe Contribute we will create the editable areas for content and for needy place holders, and this DWT will become a master page in .net may be a include file in PHP based on the technology.

For look and feel animations like flash, java script, Jquery, and mootools will be used, based on the standards and for performance less number of CSS files, js files if possible only one file, advanced concepts like CSS sprites for set of images to decrease the load time are the best practices, because page speed is an important aspect in present SEO.

Things as input:-designed .PSD files or templates

Things as output:-HTML converted pages, UI completed pages.

Coding and Content:

In this phase programmers will play an important role, with the help of designers, programmers will work on coding part based on the requirement, and the place holders will be replaced by the functional modules developed by the programmers.

Content phase is necessary mainly for the web sites. There are professional content writers, who can write relevant content for the site, based on SEO standards. For content posting they can access the pages up to the editable areas only, as discussed above, using this editable area concept we can avoid the code changes by others than programmers. And any changes in the template by programmers will be reflected in all the pages which ever are using that template. Grammatical and spell check should be covered in this phase.

Based on the design document and use cases the developer should complete the coding part, and will be integrated in the pages, after completing the modules based on the code flow, they need to document the end user navigation or process flow that can help the technical writer to write the helps and manuals.

 Testing:

Web application testing is different with software testing, most of the things are with web browsers in terms of UI, and because it is in to web the errors or bugs will vary with software testing.

Example, page load time test, because of graphics in the site, server response time, database, etc. will be tested; page speed is an important thing to any website today.

For web application/site, we need cross-browser compatibility testing, resolution testing, load testing, integration testing, functional regression testing and both manual/automated testing.

We have lot of online tools to test web site performance, in Google we have Google developer to test the page speed and the same we have in Firefox plug-ins. For ASP we have Microsoft tools too.

And in terms of standards we can validate the website in W3C for HTML, XHTML and CSS, for bad links for lot of HTML suggestions the W3C validations will help a lot.

Promotions (Social network setup and Basic SEO):

This phase is mostly for Websites, creating a web site is one task, then promoting to the right audience is a very big task, as we know the traffic from Search Engines is more than any other media, so the website should be SEO friendly, neat, relevant and with fresh content, because content is the food to crawlers.

Creating accounts in all social networking sites, like in facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and Google, submitting the site to all search engines, involving in article writing with site link, involving in the related forums.

Maintenance and updates:

Maintenance and updates are common and frequent to every website, and should be there to keep the site fresh and update.

Based on the industry and complexity of the site, it will have ongoing promotions, technical maintenance, content updates, traffic reports, and etc., to do changes again all the above steps have to be repeated.

The above steps alone are not standard or defined to web application development. Some steps may not applicable for certain projects. It depends on the cost, time involved and the necessity. Sometimes if it is an intranet site, then there will be no site promotions. But even if you are doing  small development in web, if you adopt certain planning along with this development steps in mind, it will definitely reflects in the Quality of the outcome.

I will keep posting and share my rich expertise through articles on different technologies of web application & SEO strategies. Please post your comments as a token of appreciation to this article.