We’ve recently launched our new website and thought it would be nice to reveal a little about the overall process and hopefully hear about yours.

There are many steps involved on the development of an website. From the original idea until the launch there is an entire cycle that we have to go trough.

Functional Analysis
We start off by talking about the goal of the website. In this step we need to understand the purpose of the website, clients, desired look & feel and the message to be expressed. For the Designer this step is crucial to understand the path to follow.

In the RUPEAL website we wanted this redesign to focus on the company services, with a clean and minimalist design and a direct approach.

Design
Depending on the size of the project, the design phase may vary a lot. In this case we started of with some wireframes to decide the overall position of the content and navigation. Then we did a Photoshop mockup, where we defined the look of the site, which allowed us to discuss and make changes before proceeding with development.

Development
We like to start with an PHP and CSS prototype. It allows us to have a functional website, that we can play around and quickly modify. This allows us to do cross browser testing and code validation while the amount of code is still bearable. With a functional prototype we can probe others for input much earlier in the process and they can get a better view of the final result.

With the prototype done, we move to CMS integration.

With the RUPEAL website we needed a CMS that was able to accommodate both static and dynamic content, easy to use and rapid to integrate. We chose WordPress.

Although WordPress is primarily a blogging system it can be used as a CMS through Pages and Page Templates. WordPress offers many advantages, in the development side it has extended documentation and easy-to-use plugins that help you to quickly achieve results, for the end user it has a user-friendly back office, that allows them to manage an entire website with no hassle.

Deploy
Finally we launch the website! We put everything in the server, install WordPress, load the database, setup the website and do some more testing. It’s now out on the open.

So, what’s your website development process?