First thing first: Things to do before starting a website development project.
As a full stack web developer most of the time I have been faced with a task of developing a site from scratch. This process in early days of my career seemed to be a mountain climbing journey but thankful with time and a lot of trials and errors I have come to realize what works and what doesn’t and the shortest way(or at least the right path) to take from idea, design to implementation of a web development project.
So today I would like to share some steps that we take to develop and design a website at kodemunit.com
First thing first: We collect all the necessary information on the particular project. Here we sit and carefully listen to the clients description on what exactly they want we also ask as many questions as possible, questions like what is the intention of the project? Who are the users? What information is supposed to be presented on the site? How should it look? And more questions about the customer’s brand.
Second thing: We do a quick sketch of the website mainly by using a pen and paper or sometimes the sketch is done on the white board, during the phase we create a rough representation of the proposed site with all the customers requirement and information as specified. Then once we are sure that we have included all the necessary details we move to the next stage.
Third thing: Now we use a graphics tool to create the mockup layout of the proposed website, here our favorite tool is always figma.com due to a number of reasons but mainly being that with Figma we have the freedom for the whole team to work together on the same design online, also Figma provides a good way to manage the project by giving an ability to go back in time(Version Control) as well the best we to do early stage prototype where by we can show our client what we have design and hear what they have to suggest before we go to the next step.
We have our own play book that I can not share here due to the company policy but one of the best design guide out there is this https://design.firefox.com/photon,you can go and check it out and it is a good starting point.
Next step: Once the client has approved the design, Now is when we sit and code the site.
How do you plan and design your projects? Which methodologies do you use? Which tools do you use? Please leave a comment and suggestion below.
