Components
| Domain | Your address on the web. People will type this in to get to your website. You have to register this with a domain registrar, or occasionally, your website content management system(CMS) |
| CMS | Stands for content management system. Don’t want to be stuck writing HTML and CSS for every page and change you want to make? You’ll need one of these to help you manage your content. |
| Host/Server | This is where your content lives. The internet is just basically a bunch of computers connected together, this is the computer where your website is stored. It’s much more powerful than our computers, and it stays on all the time so people can see your website whenever they want. |
Phases
| Set Goals | Discussions about what stakeholders need from a website. |
| Define Scope &Timelines | Make sure everyone is on the same page about what is going to get done. It’s very tempting to say “oh, it would be so cool if the website also had blah blah blah”, but making sure this is agreed on before work begins and a timeline is made to make sure everyone manages expectations. Adding extra tasks can add time to your development cycle, and it’s better to put a pin in things that didn’t come up the first time, and revisit it on the next iteration. |
| Sitemaps & Mockups | How will the website be organized? Sitemaps are a map of where everything is and how everything is connected in a website. Mockups are either lo-fidelity or high-fidelity. Lo-fidelity mockups are known as wireframes, and only show the broad layout of the website. High fidelity mockups are known as prototypes and give you a much more clear picture of what the final website could look like. |
| Content Creation | Lock down what you want each part of your website to say. How much you have to say, and how you want to say it will inform the final design of the website. |
| Visual Design & Code | Turn your ideas in your prototypes into actual code. There is a likelihood that you have chosen a website content management system that allows you to choose themes and create pages with custom elements to match up to your mockups. |
| Testing & Review | Ask stakeholders how the website works for their needs. Do surveys, interviews, and quality control to make sure everything works as expected. Squash bugs. |
| Launch | Your website is live! Launch your website is just the beginning – make sure you are iterating on this process to continually improve your website. |
| Maintain & Iterate | Make sure all of the software is up to date, check that your data is secure, and keep an eye on the performance of your website. Think about what’s next – what new features are users asking for? What didn’t quite make the cut because of deadlines? Work on repeating the cycle with these new features. |