There are things we need to do to complete a web development project. A successful project should be on schedule and on budget. Here are things we should do:
- Identify people who we work with: We should identify people who we will work with. They should be able to develop more detailed plans for our website. Before the web development project starts, we should make sure that we and the team are perfectly on the same page. This is important if we want to make sure that the project will proceed smoothly. This should help us eliminate any mid-development condition that may happen between us and the team. Unfortunately, some unexpected tasks can be added to the project. This could lead to bigger than planned costs, since we will need to deal with deadlines. When we add tasks to the projects, we should determine whether it is necessary to expand the scope of our project. It could also be important to ask the development team about extra cost incurred due to the extra tasks. In general, we should make sure that all members of the team can communicate well with one another.
- Set up a vision: Before designing or redesigning a website, we should have a vision on what we want. By having a definite vision, we should be able to reduce the amount of revisions needed. Multiple design revisions can boost the cost of our website, especially if we are not sure about things we should do. When starting a web development project, we should know what we will get. If we don’t seem to gain proper vision, we could start by creating a list of competing websites or those with styles that we prefer. In this case, we could combine any element from different website that could match well.
- Prepare content: Creating a website is also about preparing the right content. We couldn’t just add any content and it is important to make sure that we work with qualified copywriters. In fact, we should delay the launch of our website if we still can’t come up with proper content. A website is simply meaningless without proper content. If our content isn’t ready, then there’s no reason to publish our website, because websites are about content. Once our content is prepared in proper format, we should organize it based on different purposes. This will help us to determine the scope of our project.
- Identify user interaction: We should know how users should interact with our website. This could be achieved only by having clear understanding about the scope of the project. A simple website with only a few static webpages is different compared to more complex website with hundreds of webpages based on server-side scripting. The more feature and content we have, the more complex our website will be. We should make sure whether advanced scripting is necessary. In this case, we should be particularly clear about our requirements before we start the project.