The website development process

What is the website development process, and why is it important??

Why is the website development process crucial to your work in the world? Your website is the front door to the people you’re trying to reach.

In the past, websites were where people landed after interacting with your church, organization, products, or people. But these days, it’s much more likely that a potential attendee, member, customer, or user searches for your brand and clicks through to your homepage before they ever interact with you directly.

That’s because visiting a website requires no commitment. At worst, a person spends 30 seconds clicking around before deciding your brand isn’t for them. But at best, your website gives them a strong sense of who you are, what value you have to offer them, and what they can expect when deciding to move forward.

The website development process is creating, building, and maintaining a website. It can include programming, coding, design, content, database management, and more.

But developing a successful website—one that reaches the right people—starts with more than a domain and a dream. It starts with a high-level website development process that accounts for your brand’s strategy, strengths, goals, and primary audience.

Key Points

• Building an effective, strategic website

• The website development process: 6 steps

• Ready to build a website that connects?

Then comes the functionality. Your site should be simple for your team to navigate, update, and moderate regularly as your brand and organization grows. And it should be easy for your primary audience to explore, find relevant information, and take a clear next step.

An effective website does more than just look nice and provide basic information. It’s a strategic opportunity to connect with your audience and motivate them to trust you with their hopes, dreams, and challenges.

The website development process: 6 steps

The ArtSpeak Web Development Process: 6 Steps

1. Discovery
2. Strategy
3. Content
4. Design
5. Development
6. Support

Discovery

Before you can build a successful website that reaches the right people, you have to make sure there’s a clear understanding of who you are, what you need, and what your brand has to offer. That’s why our team always starts with discovery.

Discovery is all about getting to know YOU. We’ll dive deep into your unique goals as we learn about your vision for your brand and for your website. The first step is filling out your Web Discovery Questionnaire, where we’ll collect some high-level information about you and your site. Then, we get together with you and your team to chat all things web.

The Web Discovery Meeting is our first opportunity to get to know your team, your website, and your goals! It’s a fun, collaborative exercise between our team and yours, where we’ll ask questions, gather insight, and have conversations that guide us into the next phase.

This step includes:

• Web Discovery Questionnaire
• Web Discovery Meeting
• Website Inspiration

Web Strategy

Once we have a clear idea of your brand’s identity and audience, we’ll construct a plan to maximize effectiveness and serve your unique audience’s needs through your site.

We’ll take what we learned in discovery and create a personalized guide to your site’s strategy. This will highlight who you are, who you’re trying to reach, and how your website will function to follow that vision. Our team will think through your brand strategy as a whole and ensure your website fits into that strategy—and propels it forward. This process will lead to creating your site map (a list of all the pages on your website) and serve as our guide to take your project from ideas to execution.

This step includes:

• Custom Website Blueprint
• Site Map Creation

Web Content

When your site’s strategy is finalized, we’ll move on to your website content. You have a life-changing message, and in this step we’ll craft that message to reach more people and make an impact.

Whether you’re moving over existing content or looking to re-format or rewrite copy, we’ll help get the content organized and centralized to work alongside your updated web design.

This step includes:

• Content Strategy
• Content Management
• Web Copywriting (if part of your agreement)

Web Design

After content, we’ll move on to web design. Our goal is to create a website design that implements your brand, looks and feels like you, and works in the real world.

Our web designers will create a customized look and feel for your site that reflects who you are to every person who lands on it, with your insight and feedback applied along the way.

This step includes:

• Custom Style Page
• Key Web Page Mock-Ups

Web Development

With design direction confirmed, we begin web development! This is the part of the process where we take everything we’ve learned and use it to build your site.

We use WordPress because of its user-friendly resources and documentation, open sourcing that makes it easy to customize and build new tools for functionality, and the fact that it’s well supported and makes up over 40% of all websites online.

Equipped with your goals, inspiration, strategy, content, and design directions our team translates it all into code to create your website—one that moves fast, prioritizes SEO, and is easy to manage and keep feeling fresh. And, most importantly, furthers your mission.

This step includes:

• Core Development
• Page Building
• Review and Refinement
• Website Launch

Website Support*

When your website is complete and launched, then celebrate! But a website is a living thing—that means updates, changes, and bugs are always a possibility.

Websites are wonderful, but bugs happen. They’re a part of any functioning website, in fact. Our web developers are equipped to stay on top of them—they stay up-to-date on the latest platform updates and site environment changes, and they’re ready to handle any issues that arise. With a hosting agreement or retainer contract, let us focus on your website so you can focus on reaching more people.

This step includes:

• Up to 3 hours of support monthly for maintenance, updates, and other website requests

*with an additional contract or part of your ongoing monthly retainer