Website Development Requirements Checklist

Published on May 7th, 2020

Easy access to the internet has revolutionized the lives of humans. Huge quantities of information and data are just a single click away. The number of target audiences is expanding with each passing day. As a result, responsible web pages are becoming more popular despite the huge number of available mobile apps.

The introduction of new frameworks and programming languages has made web development complex. The presence of millions of web pages has made this medium extremely competitive as well.

Things You Need to Know Before Developing a Website

Nowadays, developing a website requires a highly skilled team of web designers and programmers, testing experts, user interface designers, and marketers.

In addition to that, there are certain requirements you must be aware of before building a new website. The below mentioned Website development requirements checklist lists down the important points which must be focused on while building a website:

Analyze your target audience

After you have successfully selected a niche for your next website, the next steps are to go through all the important checks required to build a site successfully. It’s extremely important to perform a detailed and comprehensive analysis of your target audience.

This will help you devise your website content, features, and functionality according to the needs and requirements of your potential visitors.

The audiences are analyzed with the help of creating a user persona nowadays which depends upon the following three factors :

User demographics: This includes a detailed analysis of information such as age, gender, education, occupation of the target audience.
Psychographics: This includes data of the tasks, goals, and motivation of potential users
Web-o-graphics: This comprises the user’s web experiences, locations. Platforms, operating systems, frequency, interests, social media stats, and other similar user preferences.

Choose a domain name

Selecting a domain name is the next requirement in the website development requirements checklist. The domain name must be :

Easy to remember, read and speak
It must portray your brand’s genre and nature
It must be unique and catchy
Must be relevant and concise
Must contain the main keyword
Must not have any copyright or trademark concerns
It must be a minimum 6 and maximum of 14 characters long

Select a hosting service

In order to rank higher in search engines, fast loading speed is vital. The hosting service provider determines how speedy our servers will respond to user requests and actions in addition to providing various other services.

The factors to be considered while finalizing your web hosts include the following :

Hosting packages cost
The area in which the web host specializes
Technical specifications and features
Scope of technical support during emergencies
Add-ons and features
Hardware capacities and specifications
The reputation of the hosting company under consideration
Testimonials, User reviews, and feedback
Email features
Control panel options
Scalability of the web hosts

Develop a prototype

During website development, it’s important to design a prototype in order to determine how your idea will look when it’s implemented. This process also highlights the challenges and feasibility issues likely to be faced during development. The prototypes must be:

Developed utilizing the latest technologies and prototyping tools so that these mockups can act as real websites and give you a clear overview of end results.
Must define the hierarchy of all the main pages and subpages
Must be able to record client feedback
Must depict website purpose, target audience, user goals, and website goals

Website Design

After successful prototyping, the next step is to design the web pages with the help of a UI/UX design expert. The designer’s job is to come up with a design that displays the brand message, is user friendly and interactive.

The designing process also involves additional activities such as slicing, exporting files and development of HTML/CSS versions.

Choose programming language

The source code is the spinal cord of any website. From the functionality and working of the website to data handling and extraction, everything depends on it. The programming language and framework must be chosen wisely keeping in mind the niche of your website and the latest trends in the IT industry.

Follow Development standards

The following standards must be implemented to the source code to make your website interactive and dynamic:

Reduce lines of code by removing unwanted and unconventional lines of code
Use the right indentations to enhance code readability
Keep your logic simple
Follow standard naming conventions
Make your code portable and avoid hard coded sections
Perform unit testing on your code simultaneously and utilize auto correction tools for code

Apply navigation Schemes

The website navigation must be determined by keeping target users in mind. The following tips must be following while composing navigation designs :

It must be simple and clean
Must be familiar and maintain consistency
Must be clickable and ordered
Must be responsive, visually impressive, animated, scalable and thoroughly tested

Add Smart UI Elements

The addition of Smart UI elements to your web pages adds value to them. You must :

Create engaging CTA buttons to attract user’s attention
Add buttons like Read more or Continue Reading to engage your visitors
The icons must be good looking to grab the attention of users
Provide users with best user experience through interactive designs

Strategize your Content

An effective content strategy can do wonders for your website and help you convey your message to your target audience. You must :

Compose content keeping in mind your target audience
The word count must be optimal
The content must have a call-to-action approach
The Search Engine Optimization content must be placed below the fold
Use natural language with additional voice search approach

Perform Image Optimization

Images play an important role in making your websites visually impressive and grab user’s attention. But sometimes HD images can prove to be heavy for the website, so you must optimize your images so that the loading speed does not get affected and users can enjoy the best user experience. You must :

Optimize the image file size
Use the right file extensions
Optimize the meta tags, titles, descriptions and alt tags of images to make them SEO friendly
Upload various resolutions and sizes for responsive designs
Give the best user experience by putting ideal image dimensions
Manage thumbnails intelligently
Use image sitemaps

Loading Speed

Users don’t like waiting for their websites to load and the fast loading speed is an important Google ranking factor as well. So make sure that your websites take an average of 3 seconds or less to load for the best user experience.

These tips can help you enhance your loading speed:

Implement image optimization techniques
Load background images using external CSS files
Do not use inline Javascript and CSS
The HTML code must be minifies
Use code and precise code
Utilize cache techniques to speed up loading of your website

UX Design

Your website must be designed in such a manner that it gives users the best user experience. To achieve that goal following tips must be followed :

Know your target audience and run guerilla tests to know what the ike
Keep it simple and classy
The design must be consistent
Important elements must be highlighted and hierarchy well-defined visually
Choose fonts and titles carefully
Choose colors which look attractive to users and attract their attention
The interface must be re-usable and must record customer feedback for improvements and enhancements

Website Usability

The website must be easy to use and meet the requirements and demands of the users. To achieve maximum usability you must :

Make the website easily accessible and remove any broken links
Must be mobile responsive
Must be simple, consistency, have a great information architecture and must be able to receive direct feedback
Must encourage learnability, relevancy, and credibility

Add Features and Functionality

With new technologies being introduced, the websites are becoming more interactive. Your website contains rich features and functionalities for enhanced user experience.

It must be :

Dynamic and interactive
Update based on real-time data
Have an advance search feature
Chatbot for addressing customers queries and concerns
Must include multimedia content and HD images and videos
Fast loading time
Contain smart UI elements

Formulate a branding strategy

The branding strategy must be devised based upon your brand goals and comprises of the following components :

A logo depicting brand vision
A brand theme containing brand colors and story
Adopt storytelling approach in website design
Indulge brand-centric visuals in your design
Utilize brand logo and other trademarks in your products
Utilize social media channels for branding

Onboarding

On-boarding is utilized to engage users to your website by educating them about brand goals and features of the website. It must be devised by offering :

- An impressive one-time setup
- Create excitements and generate user’s interest
- Provide user guides and manuals
- Provide tips, notifications ,pop-ups, and other such interactive elements

CTA Planning

The CTA strategies play a very important role and generation of more leads and it must be done to grab the attention of users. You must highlight important elements via visuals. It must be placed above the fold for prominence and utilization of multiple CTA elements is recommended.

Content Marketing

Content is extremely important in delivering your brand message to the audience so it must be :

- Clear and informative
- Have a great layout
- Focused
- RElevant and reliable
- Unique and user-centric
- Engaging

SEO Strategy

SEO plays a vital role in making your website stand out and rank higher on Google to gain more traffic. The right SEO include :

SEO Friendly web design
Fast loading
SEO friendly site URL
An amazing web host
CMS Integration
SEO metadata and utilization of alt tags
Link building strategies
Impressive navigation schemas
Optimized information structure
RWD
Minified scripting languages

Social Media Marketing

The number of social media users is increasing with each passing day and it has become the topmost medium for branding. You must :

Integrate your website with social media platforms
Place social media icons at suitable locations
Develop and design content for social media accounts
Share images on social media platforms

Compatibility Check

You must ensure that your website is compatible for different browsers and their versions, operating systems, platforms and screen resolutions.

Security Testing

As websites are hosted via online cloud backend servers, a lot of data is being uploaded on the server and its very important that this data is secured to avoid a data breach. In addition to that, the website comprises many integrations of APIs, Databases, applications, plug-ins, etc which makes it vulnerable.

Security testing must be comprehensively performed on your website involving authentication and authorization procedures in order to ensure data security.

Website reviews and ratings

The Google ranking factors also involve ratings and reviews given by users. So in order to build trust among users, you must share your website feedback and reviews with your audience.

Testimonials

Testimonials are very significant for your websites as they help in :

Building trust among new website users
Portray the products and services offers by the company or brand
Determining the quality and level of customers
Insights to user’s experiences

Website maintenance and updates

The frequent update and maintenance of your website is extremely helpful in increasing the ROI. The website must be developed in such a manner that it’s easily maintainable. The multimedia and other images must be kept organized. The website content must also be frequent updates so that its relevant to the changing scenarios and environment. Navigation and search functionality must be constantly updated and improved. Check for any broken links and repair them.

Sitemap

The bots and crawlers find your website through sitemap so it’s extremely important to keep your web pages intact and organized. You must:

Maintain the proper hierarchy of web pages
Update your sitemap on a regular basis
Keep an XML sitemap copy for indexing on search engine
Add a sitemap link on homepage footer
Optimize the anchor text of your sitemap with relevant titles

Site Analytics

Search engine analytics and tools are important for tracking the progress of your website via different metrics such as user behaviors, number of visitors, performance, etc. You must Integrate your website with Google and Bing analytics tools to stay updated on the stats and make necessary changes to your web pages over time.

Deployments on server

Website deployment is also vital and must be done properly to run the project successfully. For that you must :

Maintain file and folder managements for site source code
Compress the source code and site resources for fast upload onto the Cpanel
Keep the cPanel organized so that it can be modified frequently
Utilize the latest hosting tools and features for successful and quick deployment procedure

Cost

Cost is one of the most important factors while building a website. You must be well-aware of how many resources can you afford and what are the money constraints involved in your website development.

You must have a comprehensive and detailed sheet of the cost expected on each module and step during development.

A well-planned and well-designed website is necessary to carry forward your brnd image and atract visitors. For more detailed information on Website Developemnt Requirements Checklist please contact Viewy Digital