What is involved in building a website?

The question must be answered in quite general terms, because each build is different. But website projects do fall into distinct phases. Here is a quick summary of our approach.

In very small projects, some of these steps may be informal, or not required. In larger projects, there will be extra steps that are specific to the needs of the project.

Requirements

You start by explaining what you want the site to do for you, and we will discuss with you how to meet your needs.

In computer jargon, this is called requirements analysis. The business requirement (or organisational, or personal, depending on the client) is a description of what the client wants and what benefits you are looking for from the new website.

Domain name

It will be essential for you to have a domain name for your site, which means what the site's web address will be -- www.yourwebsite.com. Domain names have to be registered for you to use them. You may already have registered the name you want, or if not then we will first need to make sure it is available. One way or another you will need to have the use of a domain name to have a website.

Contract

Once we have been through all of the above with you, the costs and timescales should be agreed. Once the requirement has been well specified, we will usually quote a fixed price for completion of the job.

Both parties sign a contract, and work can begin.

Build

You provide the materials we need -- like text, logos, photos. We set it all up to work how we agreed. Job done!

Well, in an ideal world. In practice of course, it is usually a little more involved than that. As the build progresses we will show you drafts, and we will ask for your decision on any details that weren't pinned down completely in the specification.

When ready, the new website will be tested to make sure it performs the functions you wanted it to. We check against the business requirement which we started with to make sure that you have got what you wanted.

Launch

Then it is time to tell the world about your new presence on the internet. You should give some thought beforehand to how you intend to publicise the website, online and offline.

It takes a little time for search engines to index your site fully, although we will do what can be done to speed that up. Most importantly, the site will be designed in such a way that search engines can get the information they need from it and include it properly in their indexes, so that people will find you when they search for the terms you think are most relevant.

The best ways to make sure your website is easily found are first to have plenty of relevant and often-updated content, and second to make sure that you get inward links from other sites, if possible popular ones in your field of business.

Frank Pennycook