BASICS OF WEB DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT

Pre-Planning for Web Development

The key to any successful and integrated digital marketing program has to involve the development of a brand website which is considered to be ‘THE’ identity for the firm (although in the present period of mobile first, firms are constantly pushing clients to adopt mobile and other marketing apps for multiple reasons).

A website is a group of connected web pages, considered as a single entity and typically served from a single web domain. As we discussed earlier (in Chapter 1, section titled, ‘Understanding Web and Wireless Technologies’), a website runs on a combination of multi-tier infrastructure stacks and helps deliver data and content in response to any request made by a user over the internet. A website is pivotal for marketing since it is the main property (similar to a retail shop or physical office) through which any firm or its brand conducts their business in the online world. A website is not just a place for conversion or sales, but also powerfully demonstrates a brand’s imagery, design values, business functionality, speed of execution, product portfolio, marketing content, etc. It is the brand’s address on the internet for all incoming visitors, leads, customers, and even over-lookers who may want to interact or just do an initial check on the brand and its business.

All of the above make it highly relevant for any firm to set aside a specified budget towards their website development activities. This is to make sure that they definitely match (if not exceed) competition, their web development efforts towards providing customers a web destination is admired, and at the same time, it is most effective for them to conduct business. Some other key definitions which are crucial to an understanding of website development and management include:

1. Web browser: It is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and navigating information resources on the World Wide Web. A website once developed with a particular URL (Uniform Resource Locator), can be opened in any of the available web browsers with which the user has chosen to navigate the internet. The most used browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox among others.
2. Device: It applies to a hardware instrument which hosts the web browser (software) and is used to view multiple web pages on any particular website. With a growing demand for multiple devices, an understanding of how to render web pages and content for a particular device and browser has become crucial to a consumer’s overall web experience.
3. Platform: includes all the aspects of a pre-built environment with which a particular device comes to support any type of computing be it web browsing, or playing a mobile game, or going through an e-book experience, rendered specifically for that platform.

What Is Web Development?

The set of activities and efforts involved with developing websites of any type constitute web development. A website can either be a single page static site with plain information or it could be a highly interactive site with thousands of web pages executing multiple transactions with high design elements and computing power. A high traffic e-commerce site, a popular gaming site, a nice social networking site, and web application running on a tablet device, all of these constitute web development effort.

Pre-Planning for Web Development Before we begin to study the website development stages in detail, firms need to pre-plan their objectives and goals from the development standpoint. Key pre-planning activities include:

1. Developing the purpose of the website: The most important aspect is for firms to decide the nature of their website. Is it an information dissemination site (to support a majorly offline business)? Will the site be an integral part of the brand-building effort for a particular product? Or is the primary goal of the site to support online transactions? The purpose should guide the overall functionality, design, and transactional elements of the website.
2. Defining visitor segments and characteristics: It is important to determine the kind of visitors who would frequent the site, the most important personas to target, their buying behavior and prior browsing pattern, the sections on which they spend the maximum time (predictive analytics), and the conversion types which have the highest success rate.
3. Researching competitive websites/elements: To develop a successful site, it is important that the firm must have researched competing websites for the functionalities they offer, their site design, conversion techniques, etc., to differentiate and develop a unique platform.
4. Understanding latest computing platforms, browsers, devices: With increased computing power and emergence of various closed and open-source platforms and browsers emerging for multiple consumption devices, firms need to develop their web architecture in a way which is compatible across emerging web technologies.
5. Firm’s planned spend on the site: Depending upon the type of site and the effort needed to create a differential presence, firms have to take a call on how much they need to spend to be operationally efficient and reliable as these are important factors for customers, where even a single minute downtime can earn bad reputation for even established players (of which we have seen multiple examples in recent times).
6. Developing in-house or vendor development teams: Finally, firms need to take a decision on whether they want to start with a large team in-house for their web-development activities or hire an external firm and begin with a few members internally to support it. Web maintenance and frequent upgrades have made it all the more important for firms to develop certain basic set of technology capabilities in-house.

Selecting a Domain to Manage Hosting Before a firm gets into the nitty-gritties of the actual website development cycle and its key steps, they need to execute two important activities:

1. Obtaining a domain name: Any website which is developed across the internet needs to have a unique identity through which people can locate it. That unique identity is known as a domain name which identifies the ownership of that website. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the development and architecture of the domain name space across the internet.A domain name typically consists of two parts, technically called labels. For example, a website by the name xyz.com has two labels ‘xyz’ which is the name of the website and ‘.com’ which is a top-level domain. There are other top-level domains like ‘.info,’ ‘.net,’ ‘.org,’ and other country code top-level domains like ‘.in’ for India. A domain name is a component of the URL which is used to access websites. For example, for a URL: http://www.xyz.com/faq.html the top-level domain name is ‘com,’ second-level domain name is ‘xyz.com,’ and the host name is www.xyz.com.Each firm should ensure that they choose a domain name that relates strongly to their business model, is differentiated from competition, and is simple enough to follow with a high recall for their target audience.
2. Website hosting: It involves making the website accessible to its audience by hosting it with a service provider that provides internet services. There are multiple types of hosting services which firms can utilize for their websites, some of which include:
   • Shared web hosting: Type of hosting where the firm’s website will reside with hundreds or thousands of other sites on a shared server. It is the most common and usually the cheapest form of hosting, especially good for SMB businesses.
   • Virtual dedicated server: A single server is divided into multiple servers each acting virtually independently for each firm, thus providing more flexibility.
   • Dedicated hosting service: Each user gains full control over the hosting service, though they do not own the server.
   • Cloud hosting: Hosting on cloud principles and benefits; for example, utility-based billing.
   • Reseller web hosting: It allows clients to become web hosts themselves by getting affiliated to a reseller which provides shared hosting and support to other clients.

Each firm should look at these or any of the other options depending upon the kind of control they want for their site, the budget, key functionality, reach, security, etc.

Website Development Stages

With an understanding of the pre-planning that goes behind any web development effort, let us now understand the key stages of web development, the type of efforts which need to be put at each stage of execution, and the typical outputs.

Web Development Cycle

Any web development effort (website development being a part of it), would involve a firm going through key stages which are together known as the web development cycle. The life cycle stages follow the sequential waterfall model similar to a software development cycle, but there are multiple ways in which development can be executed and firms are not bound to follow these steps sequentially.

1. Analysis: The first stage of web development begins with an analysis of the site’s core users and how they would potentially interact with it. Marketers need to develop a clear idea of the website’s role in helping visitors complete specific tasks and the kind of information they would look out for on various web pages.Firms should typically have conducted prior conversions with a set of their target audience through interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and prior chat discussions to know the kind of experience they would be looking at. This exercise should help companies decide on the features to be showcased through the site and how the website would integrate best with other marketing activities happening traditionally.Key output areas at this stage should include:
   • High-level work plan for consequent stages
   • High-level cost estimates for the entire effort
   • Detailed technical requirements
   • Vendor partnerships in place
   • Content development activities
2. Requirements specification: In this stage, all the research and understanding developed in the analysis stage is used to create a preliminary specification document. An overall concept understanding is put to paper, the site structure is defined, and navigation and page-flows are developed. The most important requirement at this stage is the completion of a site-map which is a list of all the main topics of the site along with the sub-topics. This exercise also helps to provide clarity on the type of content which will be put up. Key output at this stage would include requirements specification document for the website and the sign-off proposal with stakeholders.
3. Design and development: Before this stage commences, the specifications developed in the previous stage have been signed and content has been developed or acquired from vendors. From this stage onwards, the team develops the look and feel of the website and the User Interface (UI) design development work begins. Firms need to take care of their core audience while considering the design effort for different types of web pages.Typically, a prototype is developed that is presented and iteratively worked upon for improvements. With lean development methodologies and frameworks in vogue today, firms look for cheaper and more effective ways to test their ideas and may develop them either on paper, through power point, or tools-based prototypes to show before the management and customer focus groups. This exercise helps obtain suggestions for further revisions or to obtain final approval. These prototypes, also commonly known as ‘wireframes,’ if agreed upon, can be used directly to develop real dynamic screens which look closest to the final web pages to be developed.Once the HTML proto-site (non-design oriented) is developed, art production/GIF production begins using the proto-site as outline and structure. HTML programming is continued and the content and graphics are incorporated into the final site which is then ready for testing and deployment.
4. Testing: Once the beta version of the site is available, firms proceed with quality assurance to test the complete functionality of the site. There are various types of testing which can be performed to intermediate and final versions, including usability testing, browser compatibility testing, site performance testing, etc. Once testing is complete, a testing plan should be compiled to make sure that any new changes can be documented and acted upon.
5. Deployment and maintenance: Once the site is fully tested and approved, the final stage is to deploy it and upload files to the server. Key areas for successful deployment include site publishing, regular updating and monitoring, sending of website notifications to audiences, etc. Maintenance of the site post-launch is also crucial and firms need to set up a dedicated team to help with new feature additions, enhancements, and resolution of any live issue that visitors might be facing. Marketing of the site is another important area as a website is going to be the prominent vehicle for other digital marketing activities of the firm.

Apart from the firm’s umbrella site, it is also important that similar elements are replicated in other marketing applications and each of the stand-alone brand websites too, as it is crucial to develop a uniform, recognizable, and trusted brand image for company’s marketing communication.