Many businesses turn to web development firms to build sites for a variety of purposes. Whether you need an informative site with a contact page or a fully functional e-commerce presence, you want the job to be a success. These three recommendations will help clients and developers to achieve their goals.
Scope
Clients need to define the project scope early. It is easy to talk about a project and start thinking about how additional web development services could fit into the plan. However, mission drift is what leads to project failure.
Even if you have downright grandiose plans for a website, you still need to break it into multiple projects with appropriate scopes so you can execute each one at a specific time. Suppose you want to establish a retail presence online. The scope of the project should be to develop functioning code for a site that allows you to deploy product pages. An additional feature like app functionality shouldn't be in the scope of the project at that time. You can start a new project for that purpose after you wrap up the first one.
Infrastructure
Web development requires code that can run on supporting infrastructure. You have to live with what you choose in terms of servers, programming languages, databases, cloud computing resources, and backup capabilities. Think about how these will act as the infrastructure that enables the site to run.
Suppose you run a business that's extremely seasonal. You might lean toward a cloud-based infrastructure to balance scalability with cost. During the offseason, you won't have to pay a ton for hosting, but you'll have enough overhead to scale up when your big season arrives.
Conversely, another company might need significant on-site capabilities. Its web development could involve proprietary code, and the company might need everything to run on its bare metal to avoid exposing it to third parties like web hosting providers.
Testing and Long-Term Quality Control
You need to thoroughly test a website's functionality. Even if the job involves nothing more than letting a visitor submit their email address to join a mailing list, you need to test the process from start to finish.
Likewise, you should build the site with an eye on long-term quality control. You should have analytics and monitoring in place so you can track performance. These tools can tell you when there's a potential problem. If you see that the site becomes slow to respond, for example, you can intervene and avert a potential crash.
For more information, contact a web development team near you.