Website Development Process: a Data Driven Approach
Looking to change your site? Get More Traffic? Our Data Driven Approach and process to Website Development is exactly what your site needs. Designing and Developing a successful website starts with understanding, information gathering and understanding the purpose of the website before implementing the underlying code. Despite popular belief this planning and upfront work is one of the most important steps in website design. Once the website is launched most websites become neglected and are rarely ever updated. We know that in today’s data driven world your website should be continuously updated and altered to grow as your business grows. We accomplish this by gathering, analyzing and implementing these data driven changes. Keep reading and learn our 8 steps to developing a successful website.
1) Information Gathering, 2) Planning, 3)Design 4) Content Writing and Assembly 5) Coding 6) Testing, Review and Launch 7) Maintenance 8) Conversion Rate Optimization and Improvement
Information Gathering - Understanding Your Brand
This step is by far the most important step when it comes to developing an online presence and website. Helping your developer and designer to understand your goals, customers and products is key to your websites launch and design. Our new approach focuses on gathering as much information as possible before starting your design. We follow a data driven method that uses case studies performed by many sources for improving SEO, Conversion and User experience. This process focuses on understanding you, your business and desired users. As a new or established business owner being able to describe your brand to a developer is essential to portraying this brand online as well. So, first things first, you should be able to answer the following:
What is your target audience? Who are you trying to connect with or sell too? What are your products or services and how are you different from your competitor?
If you don’t know the answer to this our developers and marketing professionals can help you to establish your brand as well. We like to have a in person meeting or a video conference with your team to learn about your business so that we can include the appropriate optimizations and content for your users.
Planning - Creating a timeline
Once we understand your brand and users we can plan the design and building timeline. We will review the features you require, customized code that is needed and how many pages we will need to develop. We will work with you and your team to provide a comprehensive timeline with deadlines and meetings. This planning meeting is key to understand your desires and timeline so we can deliver at the peek opportunity for you business. This planning step generally involves:
1. Timeline with Deadlines
2. Features that are needed to be developed
3. Content that needs to be generated
4. A required website launch date and marketing emails
One thing that frustrates most business owners is not knowing when the site should be done, what it involves and how it works. We feel that creating this comprehensive and transparent plan is essential to keeping a business owner involved in the creation of their site and prevents these types of frustrations. Your satisfaction is our Utah based web development teams top priority.
Website Design - Creating your style
Now the fun work begins where we work together with you and your teams to design your site to match your brand. We take two paths in our website design processes depending on your need. Our first approach is to follow your current marketing brand and design the brand based on your current operations. Our second approach, if needed, we will do a complete overhaul of your site from the ground up with a rebrand.
As part of this we include you in the entire design process asking for your opinion and input. We believe that your opinion is important and will have you check off each page as they are completed. When working with a web design company we recommend staying involved in this process as it should represent your style and your business.
Content Writing and Assembly - Sharing Your Message
Content is key when sharing your message and growing your online business. Content writing and research is key to establishing your spot on the web. As Search Engine Optimization continues to grow and is becoming more competitive, your content and verbiage also grows in importance. Content can determine who sees and who doesn’t see your site. In our design and assembly we implement SEO Optimization techniques to help you establish a spot in google rankings and other search engines. This process is pivotal to your organic traffic growth and Domain Authority.
Coding - Website Development and Feature Creation
Once the Design and content are in place writing and developing the sites features begins. This is the step that you will start to see your website come to life. We can integrate your scheduling software, forms, subscriptions, downloads, Products and much more into your website to provide any functionality that you desire. This process can be time consuming but when done correctly will greatly improve the efficiency and speed of your website. A WordPress Pro can integrate and build many custom solutions to your unique needs. Part of this coding will generally involve adding site analytics such as google analytics and google search engines to gather data on your websites traffic and search engine rankings.
Testing, Review and Launch - Making sure it works
This is the crucial last step of creating your website. When the design, coding and features are all built and functioning it is important to test each feature on a cell phone, tablet and desktop computer to ensure that the features and website are all working correctly. You should require extensive testing of your site before launch. Once testing is passed it is important for you as a website owner to review every aspect of your website be approving the work. Generally this review is done on a video chat or in a meeting where you can work hand in hand with the developer to fix any small issues that may be identified. At the end of the review you are ready to launch the site at a set time. We recommend running a marketing campaign announcing your new website shortly before the launch. Your site is now launched and live to your customers. This is a time for celebration and a huge milestone
Website Maintenance and Support - Making sure it continues to work
As a dedicated website support and maintenance company, Based in Utah, We understand the importance of getting monthly website support from a webmaster or WordPress developer. Websites are not immune to hackers, bad servers, updates or software bugs. Website support contracts and services ensure that your WordPress website is secure, available and working as expected. They are there to provide customer service, consultation and general website design and development. Learn more about what we offer in our support packages here.
Conversion Rate Optimization - Data Driven Designs and Updates
Along with Website Maintenance and support it is important to continuously work on improving, updating and growing your website to improve conversion. As part of our unique strategy we use our Data driven design optimization to continuously improve their websites. This ongoing addon service is meant to improve your sites conversion percentage and provide a better user experience for your users. Don’t fall behind the competition by using our Data Driven Design process. We use many tools to help gather and interpret your users experience to better your website and make small and large changes to a website.
Website Development Process Timeline and Overview
Website Development and Design Process FAQ's
Generally Website Support is charged on a monthly basis once the site is launched. The monthly fee for a webmaster and website report contract can vary, though they can range between $150- $2000 a month. This generally will pay for a webmaster that will work directly with you to maintain and improve your website. We provide these services at a much better price point than many other web development companies. All of our web developers and online marketing engineers are located in Utah and are trained in customer service and support.
Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of changing a website design in order to improve a users desire to perform a desired action such as purchasing a product from your ecommerce store. We, at Branching Software, approach this type of optimization by utilizing user data that we collect with a variety of tools. After collecting this data we analyze this data to determine what will entice your customers to perform the action we want. This is an addon service we provide with our support contracts. If you are interested in this please send us a message and we will be happy to have a call with you.
Unfortunately this can be a difficult question to answer as it depends on your websites needs and features. You can find places that develop a website in 3 days where others may take 6 months. These timelines are generally based on the platform you have chosen, WordPress vs Custom, and other features you require. This is why we have our planning session to help set the appropriate timeline for your project.