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By Harry Robinson•20th November 2024
Any project needs a well-defined and effective workflow, no matter its scope or scale. The primary need of a workflow is to ensure the highest levels of efficiency in all the tasks involved.
The best web development workflows help you minimise errors and improve team collaboration, as well as ensuring the end product meets the client’s needs and is delivered on time. This is especially important for web development projects, which often face creative and technical challenges at various stages and need exceptional planning and execution for perfect outcomes.
Whether you’re working on a modern web development workflow for your web development team or looking to update your current website development process checklist, read our tips for creating the best web development workflow for forward-thinking agencies.
A web development workflow references the development process, covering all the steps taken by web developers while creating a website. These steps cover all aspects of a project, from the initial planning phase right up to the post-launch phase.
The key goal of developing a modern web development workflow is to enable clients to track every step of the development process closely. Built by developers, web development processes vary according to the client’s requirements. It’s important to get this workflow right as it can make or break your site development process.
The web development workflow structure is generally divided into three basic steps:
In this phase, the project’s objectives and the business’s target audience are identified.
During phase two, the team shares their ideas and thoughts to implement in the web development process.
Step three is the most critical phase, as you’re one step away from getting the website live. The testing team starts the website testing process to check for any errors and bugs, and identifies further improvements if needed.
Now you know a bit about the web development process, let’s move on to explore the best web development workflow tips for your project.
The following tips serve as the best web development process checklist to follow for developing a top-tier website.
The very first step in the process involves the web development team talking to the client and the stakeholders involved to understand their expectations and desired outcomes from the project.
One way to do this is to get your client to fill out a design and development brief, where they can define their needs, expectations, and preferences for the website. This eliminates the need to routinely check back with the client for clarifications.
Armed with this detailed information, your team can move to the next step of web development workflow.
In step two, you want to determine the purpose of the project along with its objectives and target audience, by asking these questions:
Is the website to be used only for informational purposes? Or will it be a fully functional shop?
Who is the business’s target audience?
Who are the business’s competitors?
How does the client want to differentiate themselves from their competitors’ websites?
This step in the website development process checklist spells out an efficient start to the project with clearly defined goals and outcomes.
It’s natural for lots of ideas to be generated during the planning stage. In step three, you can ensure none of these valuable ideas are lost by making them more tangible, either by documenting them or through visual representation.
One of the best ways to represent an idea visually is by creating wireframes, which are mock-ups of how the website’s pages will appear. Keeping everything documented will save you from second-guessing and spending unnecessary time on later stages in your workflow.
With your team, plan the complete flow of the web development process, breaking down tasks into manageable chunks. Every member of your team can take up different chunks to complete the deliverables in their defined timeframe.
Keeping up with all these tasks can be overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have a project management system in place. QualityHive is a feedback and testing tool that can also double up as your project management tool. Our tool helps you monitor the real-time web development workflow of your project internally and with your client.
You can use QualityHive to see your project’s workflow at a glance, keep track of the progress on the Kanban board, and check whether or not your team is on schedule with our tool’s cutting-edge features.
Most clients have a content management system (CMS) on board. But in case it’s left to you, at this stage, your development team needs to determine which CMS is ideal to meet the website’s requirements.
Here, your team begins the process of designing the website logo, web pages, print assets, branding assets, and other social media graphics.
Next, the content team initiates the copy process by creating attention-grabbing and search-engine-optimised content. Any required web page customisations are done here.
When the website is ready for review, it means it’s almost ready for the penultimate stage: the launch.
The website should undergo an in-depth review to detect the even smallest mistakes and bugs. Once the bugs are dealt with, the website is sent to the client for review.
Keeping track of errors, feedback, and comments from clients can be difficult for your web development team, and you’ll benefit from a tool that can easily pinpoint the issues and send screenshots. This is where QualityHive can help streamline your quality assurance (QA) and review process.
Feedback generated using videos with audio is even better, since this can give a clear explanation and help you avoid confusion. Track all these comments and feedback in real-time without having to consult feedback Excel sheets and PDFs. QualityHive offers all this and more, with user-friendly integration into the most popular web browsers.
The best web development workflow never skimps on the testing stage. Website testers check for broken links and other anomalies, obtaining a good understanding of how responsive and user-friendly the website is.
QualityHive can aid in the user acceptance testing (UAT) process through real-time and interactive feedback flow. You don’t need to go back and forth to check on errors and fix them when our tool can point you in the right direction.
In this final stage, your website is ready to launch. Once it’s live, your team can keep track of visitors to the site, collect data, maintain records for analytics, and share reports with the client.
Having the best web development workflow in place offers the most optimal way to work through each aspect of the website, all while saving time and resources. With the guidelines in this article and QualityHive’s feedback tool, you can further enhance your team’s web development workflow with less stress and more efficiency.
Our website feedback tool is packed with revolutionary features to reduce the stress of QA, testing, and feedback on your web development team. QualityHive is a tool so good that you’ll start looking forward to feedback.
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