Web Development is a term for any activity related to developing a Website.Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services.
Given the rapid growth of this sector, several companies have started to use offshore development in India and other countries with a lower cost per developer model. The time difference when working with India and China for the Western world allows work to be done round the clock adding a competitive advantage.
Web Development Cycle
Website Development Life Cycle is basically a 6-step process.
Those 6 steps are:
1. Website Requirements and Analysis
2. Specification of Requirements
3. Site Structure and Design
4. Website Construction and Testing
5. Marketing (SEO / PPC / etc)
6. Analysis of Statistics and Maintenance.
Website Requirement and Analysis: define target audience, purpose, objectives, and policies for information development and use. You need to determine exactly who your targeted audience is. What age group do they fit in? What gender will the majority of your targeted visitors be? What income level will they have? What personalities will they have? These things are very important when developing your website requirements and analysis - this is the foundation of your website. Knowing who they are will help you understand what they need, in terms of what kind of functionality should your website provide them with, that they will require? Will they need product reviews? Will they be searching for the lowest prices? Etc.
Specification of Requirements: Here you will go through each and every one of the requirements you wrote down in step 1 and for each you will develop a use-case. A use-case is where you will determine ‘what will the user do/ what action will the user take’. Here’s an example of a use case: User Begins at Home Page –> User clicks on Featured Item Image –> User sees item description –> User goes to merchant site via aff. Link Or alternatively User Begins at Home Page –> User searches via the provided search –> User doesn’t find the item they want –> User leaves.
Site Structure and Design: The process by which a web designer, working within the web’s specification, makes decisions about how a web’s actual components should be constructed. This process involves taking into account the web’s purpose, audience, objective, and domain information. A good designer knows how to achieve the effects called for by the specification in the most flexible, efficient, and elegant way. Because it relies so heavily on the other processes and elements in web development, however, the design process is not more important than any of the others, but it requires a thorough grounding in implementation possibilities as well as knowledge about how particular web structures affect an audience.
Website Construction and Testing: The process of actually building the web using HyperText Markup Language (HTML or improvements on it). The implementation process is perhaps most like software development because it involves using a specific syntax for encoding web structures in a formal language in computer files. Although automated tools are available to help with the construction of HTML documents, a thorough grounding in HTML as well as an awareness of how designs can best be implemented in HTML enriches the web implementer’s expertise.
Marketing: The process of handling all the public-relations issues of a web. These include making the existence of a web known to on-line communities through publicity, as well as forming business or other information relationships with other webs. Promotion might involve using specific marketing strategies or creating business models.
Maintenance: Ok congratulations by now you should have a functional website receiving some targeted traffic and converting well. How well is it really converting? This is the stage where you look at your statistics, and by statistics I mean run every figure you have through something like excel and figure out just how good or bad things are. Check out your payment reports, find out how many click-throughs you’ve sent to each merchant, how well a merchant converts them, how many visitors you received etc. Analise these numbers, find out for each visitor how many will buy. Find out which merchants aren’t performing, etc. Now for maintenance. Since you’ve done the number crunching and realised merchant (XXXXX) did not perform well, you want to disable them for the next month and give other merchants a better chance to see how they perform. Simple, if you followed the little tip in step 3, you can easily disable the merchant and go about your business. What a time saver.
