Did you know that out of approximately 8 billion people, over 5 billion people use the internet almost every day? Whether to order their favorite snack or book a flight ticket, find a doctor nearby, or use map services, the internet has become a part of everyday lives for the majority of people across the globe. And this connectivity has influenced businesses massively to adopt websites and apps as one of the most reliable tools to connect with people.
However, it is also a fact that the increasing popularity of digital transformation has also boosted the competitiveness of the digital ecosystem among businesses. Now strategies are constantly evolving to give all businesses a fair opportunity to grow themselves and be more visible on search engines and social media.
One of the initial steps taken to onboard the digital ecosystem is preparing a good website. But to build a good website, there are certain standards that top web development companies recommend. Let’s have a look at these standards.
First Observe, then Plan
Irrespective of the nature of your business, it is always a good strategy to monitor your competitors first. Find out if there are businesses functioning that have already built websites even if they are not in the same regions as you. Gather data through a link tracker that can monitor website traffic, annual growth statistics, conversion rates, and more. Then, plan your website accordingly by adopting the positive aspects and optimizing areas of improvement based on your website strategy.
Gather Feedback on the UI/UX
Before finalizing the UI/UX of your website, gather some feedback from your peers, friends, and colleagues. Any UX design company you partner with will recommend you this step as it gives a better understanding of the experience that real users might face in the future when your website is launched in the market.
Focus on Personalization
One of the modern growth hacks used by digital product manufacturers is using personalization to offer a better user experience. To do that effectively, developers are leveraging technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). ML helps developers constantly track user behavior to use the data with AI for better product or content recommendations. These technologies can be helpful in improving the average time spent on the website by users along with boosting their overall experience as well.
Plan Your Entire Budget in Advance
The website development process includes a range of phases starting from the research phase to the launch of the website and post-launch upgrades and maintenance. The development of a website includes programming that can last months depending on how complex your website is. Most of the developers, whether you hire a company or freelance developers, charge hourly. So depending on the complexity of your website, the number of hours involved in the development process can increase. Additionally, there will be costs associated with the marketing of your website, costs to get permission and register your website, costs for upgrading the website once it is released in the market, etc.
Use Promotional Tools Available
To market your website, you have a range of paid and free options available. Unpaid options like social media platforms are used by businesses to grow organic traffic on their social media platforms. On social media platforms, hashtags, views, photos, videos, etc are some of the ways to promote your business. However, there are paid ways to get popular on social media platforms as well. You can pay influencers to advertise your website, pay social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to run your ads, and more. Social media can also help you in attracting good conversion rates if you are selling products or services.
Use the Beta Version to Test the Waters
A beta launch of the website can help you in finding out if there is something that you have missed while building your website but could be helpful to get good outreach. You can invite a limited number of people to sign up for a beta version of your website before the actual launch.
For a while, gather feedback from these signed website users and make amendments to the website accordingly to ensure that your user satisfaction ratings are good. The beta launch is one of the common practices you will see that website developers follow.
Keep Your Website Compatible with Modern Technologies
Remember that the IT industry is evolving super fast. Every other day it releases new technologies that you might find getting integrated into smartphones or browsers depending on their usage. So, while building your website, ensure that your website is keeping up with these evolving technologies to keep it trendy and interesting for the evolving users as well. You can follow web blogs like MobileAppDaily, Infolio, IBM Blogs, ReadUs247, and more to keep up with these evolving website development trends.
Ways to Save Money on Website Development
Website development is a complex task that requires a good level of expertise to keep them safer from cyber attacks. However, you can ensure this even while saving money on development. Some steps that you can take to save money on website development are-
- Hire developers or development companies from regions with low costs such as India
- Try to hire startups as these organizations offer competitive prices to grow in the market
- Compare perks offered by shortlisted companies and make the final decision that is most profitable for you
- To ensure you don’t have to bear too many maintenance costs post-delivery of the website, always go through past projects done by the company you are considering to build your digital product
- Partner with companies that offer package deals such as some companies that offer web development and marketing packages for websites, some will help you in designing and wireframing your website free of cost (or as a part of the package), etc.
Conclusion
Well, the quality of website development is absolutely crucial to maintain especially at the time of launch as you are planning to grow your business further and you do not want to leave a first impression bad. So, while planning your website, it is also important to remain patient and take your time in the development process so you can ensure your product is in the best state before it is actually launched in the market for real people.
At last, hopefully, our discussion on the web development process was helpful for you and will help you in building and deploying websites of the best quality standards.
