It is becoming increasingly important to have a strong online presence. This begins with having a good-quality website, yet many businesses usually underestimate how strategic (and complex) the website development process can be. The website development life cycle consists of several key development phases, each essential for planning, project management, and timeline tracking. Every step plays a crucial role in the final user’s experience and thus affects how effectively your company and its values are represented.
We’ll walk through each stage of the website development process, explaining why each step matters and how the Big Red Jelly’s proven process ensures better outcomes. Effective project management is crucial to ensure each phase is executed efficiently and deadlines are met.
By following a structured process throughout the website development life cycle, you can achieve successful website development that meets your business goals.
Brand
1. Understand Your Business
It’s essential to understand what defines our brand identity and what our value proposition is. This is the foundation of the web development process to ensure that your business, and by extension your website, accurately represents your business and effectively communicates it’s value. Think of it as answering the following questions:
- How do I want my users to perceive my brand? (premium / accessible, innovative / reliable, etc..)
- What problem does my company solve for my customers ?
- Why should a client choose my product over other ones on the market?
By answering these questions you’ll have a clear understanding of what your brand represents and why it matters to customers. Identifying your target audience is a key step in the website development process, as it ensures your content and design are tailored to the specific needs and preferences of those you want to reach, which leads us to our next step: understanding who those customers actually are.
2. Understand your Audience
The final goal of our website is to solve our users’ inquiries and allow them to perform tasks that they specifically would want to complete (Eg: purchase a product), and we can design a process that feels easy and intuitive if we know who our user is. When tailoring the website for your audience, it is crucial to consider user experience aspects to ensure the site is engaging and meets their needs.
Understanding your real users’ goals, behaviors and pain points gives us a direction: what to build and what problems to solve for them.
Ask yourself this question, if you were building a physical store, would you design it the same way for young children, gym enthusiasts or business executives ? Of course not. the same principle applies to websites, knowing your audience shapes every decision.
3. Build Your Visual Identity
We, as humans are highly visual beings, our ability to recognize patterns and match colors with emotions is the reason why we remember brands through visual cues. In this step we will define the following
- Color palette
- Typography
- Common patterns (Shapes and forms)
- User interface elements (such as buttons, menus, and navigation) to ensure a cohesive and intuitive website experience.
A consistent visual identity will help your users recognize and understand your brand immediately. Even before they read a single word.
Content
We’ve already established that, as humans, we are highly visual. However, our website still needs actual precise and concise information to reliably communicate your value. An important truth to remember is that most users don’t read, they scan. They are on your website for a mission, looking for the specific information that they need. High-quality website content is essential for engaging users and supporting SEO, ensuring your site performs well in search rankings and keeps visitors interested.
At this stage in the website design and development process, the focus is crafting relevant content that has a clear purpose for our website. Web content is structured and managed to align with user needs, making sure information is accessible and easy to navigate. The visuals and interactive elements should also guide the user to this purpose without overwhelming them.
Our proven process writes strategically by focusing on Information hierarchy using headings, bullet points, and other assets to guide the attention to what matters the most, with content creation as a strategic process for developing effective website messaging.
Building: Bringing the Strategy to Life
This is the stage where all the planning takes shape and becomes reality. The development team is responsible for executing, coding, testing, and managing the entire website build, ensuring collaboration across all phases. Design and development work together to create a website that’s not only visually appealing but also functional, fast, and scalable. Allocating the right development resources is essential to align team members and stakeholders, ensuring a smooth and successful process.
1. Map the Customer Journey and User Experience
At this point we know very well who our users are and what goals they want to achieve on our website, we then have to map out how the users will navigate through our website to achieve this goal. This will define which pages and features are required. Creating comprehensive site maps at this stage helps visualize the website’s structure and navigation flow, providing a clear blueprint for organizing content and planning the user journey.
For example, a travel company might need a search flow and steps that let the user book a flight, while an e-commerce company might have a clear and easy purchase process.
2. Build a Strategic Sitemap
The sitemap serves as the blueprint for your website, outlining how pages are structured and how users can move between them. A well-planned site architecture is essential for organizing website content and navigation, ensuring both users and search engines can easily find information. The objective is to define a clear path to guide the user through the customer journey. This will also make the website easier to find by search engines.
Think of it like designing the layout of a house. You have already defined what rooms you need; now you are deciding how to connect them. At this stage, it’s important to identify and create page templates, and define each page template, to ensure a consistent layout and functionality across the website.
3. Website Development
This is the step where the website itself comes to life. The development phase is where writing code and web programming bring the website to life, using html css and javascript, hypertext markup language, and cascading style sheets as foundational technologies. There are several approaches to website development, each suited to different business needs:
- Custom Code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript): Offers full flexibility and scalability, ideal for complex or high-performance sites. This approach involves choosing the right programming language, utilizing various programming languages, and often includes server side languages for back end development, ensuring the site can handle advanced features and integrations.
- Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress: Balance customization and ease of use, allowing marketing teams to update content without developer support.
- No-Code/Low-Code Builders (Webflow, Squarespace): Provide speed and simplicity, often best for startups or small businesses with limited budgets.
- The development process involves backend developers who handle server-side logic and integrations, front end developers focus on user interface and experience, full stack developer and full stack developers who manage both front-end and back-end tasks, and web developer and web developers who ensure the technical aspects and functionality of the site.
Development tools, file transfer protocol, and a content management system are essential for building, deploying, and managing the website efficiently.
Database management and seamless integration of systems and data sources are crucial for robust website functionality.
A deep understanding of technical aspects is required throughout the development life cycle and development phases of any web development project or website development project.
The entire project is managed as a development project, with multiple development projects and web development projects often running in parallel to meet business goals.
The goal is to deliver a final product and launch a new website composed of multiple web pages, with each web page carefully crafted for performance and usability.
Maintaining websites and post launch maintenance are ongoing responsibilities to ensure long-term success and stability.
A website development checklist is used to ensure all steps are completed and nothing is overlooked during the process.
4. Testing and Launch
Before going live, your website should go through a testing phase to review design, usability, and responsiveness across different screen sizes. Quality assurance is essential during this phase to ensure the website meets performance and usability standards. Additionally, validating your website’s code against current web standards is important to guarantee browser compatibility and proper functionality across different platforms.
Launching isn’t the final step, it’s the beginning. Before going live, make sure to address search engine optimization to improve your website’s visibility in search results. Ongoing monitoring and audits keep your website performing optimally.
Strategy
The Strategy phase is data-driven. We don’t guess what works; we use smart measurements and analysis to make sure the website meets the goals we previously defined. We leverage marketing tools to track and optimize website performance, ensuring that every aspect is aligned with our objectives. Tracking the users’ experience on our website helps us identify pain points more easily.
For example, high bounce rates on a specific page may signify misleading content, while users taking too long in a process means that the flow is too complex. Having these insights allows us to quickly identify what tasks to prioritize based on the best feedback there is: our real users’ experience.
Grow
The Grow phase is the ultimate goal of our website and our company: to achieve sustained business growth. It involves continuously applying the insights we gather in the Strategy phase and using modern tools at our disposal to optimize results. Leveraging relevant online resources is also essential to support ongoing website growth and ensure we are utilizing the best digital tools and content for our target audience. Our efforts focus on the following areas:
- Accessibility & Speed: Having a fast, lightweight website that users can navigate across any device—cellphones, tablets, and computers—will help reduce friction and therefore help our users navigate through their customer journey.
- SEO & Content: Creating and optimizing quality content is an organic way to tell search engines that our website is valuable to its users, which will help the website improve its visibility.
- SEM & Ads: To drive traffic where it is most appropriate.
Conclusion:
Developing a website is much more than following a guide or checklist — it’s about understanding your business and audience, and crafting a digital tool that solves their inquiries and problems.
Each phase, from planning to building, is equally important. Skipping or rushing through these steps can lead to rework or a suboptimal website.
At Big Red Jelly, we’ve perfected these steps through our proven process, which guarantees not only a high-quality website but also measurable business growth. Get in touch with our team today!
