What are the best practices for developing a custom website?
Website development is a challenging process, it needs the correct codes, ensuring the design is interactive, along with ongoing and proper maintenance. The website is the first impression you will make on your online customers, it needs to be clutter-free and unique. Visitors need to get what they are looking for when they arrive on your site.
Custom website development is creating a website from start to finish, based on your businesses needs, and goals. It is not the same as a pre-built website you can get off one of the website building platforms. Custom website development is the design and coding of every aspect of the website, matching your functionality and design preferences.
During the process, the developer works alongside the client, understanding their vision, objectives, and audience. The design is implemented as a personalised solution, aligned to their branding, functionality, and user experience goals.
This provides you with a scalable and functional website, giving you control over the final design. It also helps you add features and capabilities you would not get with off-the-shelf pre-build website designs.
There are some important steps that are needed to develop a custom website. A custom website is designing a website from conception to deployment.
Any custom website development starts with in-depth planning. Before you start, the project goals, target audience, and scope need to be defined. This is the first step and often includes research, while understanding the business needs.
From here you turn to an important part of the development process, focusing on what the website will look like, ensuring it is visually appealing. This step should focus on user experience (UX). Creating prototypes and wire frames are used to visualise the flow and layout of the website. User experience ensures clear call to actions, seamless navigation and an intuitive user interface.
You can ensure your website is a success by choosing the right programming languages, libraries, frameworks, and databases. You will also need to focus on performance, security, and integrating any third-party services.
The front-end is where users interact. This includes translating code into JavaScript, CSS, or HTML. At this point, you will want to ensure the site is responsive, meaning it will work seamlessly on any device, screen size, and screen orientation. Interactive elements should be implemented, enhancing user engagement.
Back-end is the behind the scenes functionality of the website. This includes data processing, database interactions, external services, and APIs. This is what enables the website to operate effectively.
Testing is very important to ensure your website functions smoothly when it is deployed. This involves checking and fixing any issues that the website may have. It helps you make a good first impression on your customers. These tests usually include performance tests, usability tests, and functionality tests.
With the testing completed, and any issues fixed, you can now deploy your website, choosing a reliable server and hosting environment. Once deployed, you will want to test the website again, ensuring that it is all working as expected.
While you may think once your website is deployed and is visible on the internet, your custom website is complete. This is not the case, your website will need ongoing maintenance and upgrades. Monitor the performance, security vulnerabilities, and user feedback, helping you improve the functionality of your custom website.
Custom website development can be very rewarding, enabling you to present your audience with a unique, high quality, professional, and functional website. If you want a custom website that will set you apart from your competitors, while providing a great user experience, give Genie Crawl a call today.
Complete the form and a member of our team will be in touch shortly to discuss your enquiry.