In Part One of our two-part series: Your Ultimate Guide to Building a Website, we discussed the ins and outs of excellent web design. From establishing your website’s purpose to creating a strategy to making a prototype, the design process ensures that your site will look and read the right way. Now, it’s time to put those pieces together for an actual site launch!
To get started, let’s define what the web development process is. According to HubSpot, web development is “the tasks and processes involved in creating and maintaining a website. This includes everything from markup and coding to scripting, network configuration and CMS development.”
Web programming, in contrast, is a more narrow set of procedures. A web programmer contributes to specific parts of a website’s construction, namely front-end and back-end coding and scripting. This team is responsible for tasks like writing code and troubleshooting bugs.
Now that we know a little more about their work, let’s meet the types of web developers. Forbes divides them into these categories.
- Front-end: Developers who handle what users see and experience on a site, like the design, functionality and navigation.
- Back-end: Developers who work behind the curtain, covering everything from security to integrations to storage.
- Full-stack: Developers who work with both front-end and back-end.
With the rise of smartphones, there are also mobile developers who build apps and specialize in working with mobile devices. The Rivers Agency web development team includes 12 in-house experts, equipped with the wide range of skills listed above. We would love to help you start building your website, so keep reading to learn how the development process works.
Developing and Optimizing
Now that we know about the design side of building a website, let’s transition to the more technical aspects of the process. It’s not just about the words that appear on the screen or the carefully selected colors of the icons, but how these elements become an actual, functioning website.
Responsive Web Design
First, consider the importance of responsive web design. As defined by Adobe, this concept “considers the user’s platform, screen size and orientation to make dynamic changes to how content is displayed.” In other words, responsive web design makes sure your site visitors can not only access your site easily from their laptops, but their phones, iPads and other devices. This is also where site accessibility is considered. Color contrast, alternative (alt) text and more are evaluated to ensure your site is accessible to everyone.
Adobe suggests several methods for achieving responsive web design. First is using HTML and CSS, which control the structure, content, design and layout of a site. They can be used to automatically resize your site. One specific CSS tool is media queries, which can optimize your site per type of device.
Another responsive design consideration is the type of layout your site will use. A flexbox layout helps align your content in a more responsive and maintainable way, but this one-dimensional layout system does not work if your design is on the complex side. A grid layout uses rows and columns to give your two-dimensional layout a skeleton. Using flexbox and grid together can create CSS that is easy to read and maintain, and allows complex designs to meet the site. Finally, consider speed in your responsive web design. Optimizing images and using caching will speed up your site.
Coding
When it comes to coding your site, a lack of coding knowledge doesn’t have to stop you. Another development tool is a content management system (CMS), defined by HubSpot as “a software application that allows users to build and manage a website without having to code it from scratch, or know how to code at all.” The perks of this tool are easy collaboration and a whole host of SEO tools, security features and other integrations.
If you don’t know how to code, a CMS will allow site editors without an understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to contribute to the site. But, at the end of the day, a web developer is essential to getting your website up and running. At Rivers, our team is full(y) stacked with coding experts, get it?
Experienced developers will ensure that the code of your site is clean, and clean code matters. Clean code is readable by others, has consistent style, has documentation and comments that are relevant to understanding it, and is without unused or redundant code. At Rivers, our developers specialize in creating clean code. And they also make sure your site is secure.
Evaluating Quality Assurance and Preparing for Launch
Just as your big presentation should be proofread for any typos or sentences that fall apart, your website should be tested for quality assurance. The testing phase is a comprehensive one, and there are plenty of assessments for your site to pass before it can go live. There are dozens of test types, but it is important to start with the basics.
- Functionality: Atlassian categorizes functional tests as those which check the result of an action. An example would be if a user can pay for an item if they key in their correct credit card information.
- Compatibility: Testing for compatibility, as defined by BrowserStack, goes back to the responsive web design we discussed earlier. This testing looks to see if your site works in various browsers and across device types.
- Performance: According to Atlassian, performance testing evaluates how your site responds to differing workloads. This could be how your website loads with lots of requests and traffic at once, a time when you definitely want your site to be working as intended.
Pre-launch, you should also make sure to revisit your brand’s design elements, discussed in Part One. Give the content one final read, or maybe two, and once again evaluate your work for SEO and UX. From here, it’s time for launch.
On your site’s launch day, any integrations must be set to production mode, validating email sending and allowing your site to be seen by search engines. At Rivers, we work ahead to complete these tasks before launch and run through your various site features to ensure they will function as expected before visitors can explore. Lastly, the domain’s DNS records are updated to point to your site.
Some tasks pertaining to SEO can only be performed after the site is live, such as setting up a Google Search Console property for the domain. Once this has been completed, we make a final pass through the site’s features, notify the client and pop the champagne!
Post-launch Support
After your site is launched, the day is not done for your developers. Part of good web development is ongoing support. From site maintenance and updates to monitoring for security, developers must continue to check in on your site. The Rivers development team offers the following services for your site post-launch.
Hosting
We offer site hosting to all of our clients in a dedicated, high-performance, reliable and scalable environment. Hosting with Rivers ensures your site receives 24/7 monitoring, and allows us to take quick action if any issues arise.
Maintenance
For all of our maintenance clients, we ensure that the site hosting environment is up to date with the latest security and reliability patches, and will apply and test all updates to the site on a quarterly basis. This ensures that client sites are always current and performance, reliability and security are maximized. Additionally, we complete functionality tests, making sure contact forms, email sending, ecommerce actions and more work as expected.
Security
Rivers uses network-based tools to prevent multiple types of unauthorized access to your site hosting environment. These controls help remove the ability for any attacker to gain access to your site in the first place. They are paired with software monitoring and tools such as application firewalls, which detect any suspicious activity that is not otherwise blocked and alert our team to take action.
Reliability and Resilience
Our hosting environment is set up to offer redundancy and resiliency at every level. By using modern tools, we provide fail-safe storage to prevent data loss, ephemeral servers to prevent any server or configuration level loss, and multiple levels of backup as a final fallback measure. As a result, we have high uptime numbers for all of our sites. Additionally, our network is built within one of the largest hosting providers in the world, which gives our team access to high levels of bandwidth. This bandwidth allows us to stay online and continue service if your site receives an extreme load event.
Rivers Agency: Your Web Development Experts
The Rivers team has launched websites for clients across sectors and would love to take your site to the next level. Beyond launching a website, our team has experience driving customers to sites through other marketing channels, including social media campaigns, blogs and newsletters, and even environmental and printed advertising.
Our skillset is vast and ever-expanding, but our desire to work with clients long-term remains the same. Start your journey of launching a website that is not only consistently branded and search engine optimized, but one that functions excellently. Reach out to Rivers Agency today using our contact form to get started.