It’s a common misconception that Website Design and Development is “easy to do” and that it should only take a few days, or even hours, to build a complex, yet beautifully seamless and secure website. This blog dispels these falsehoods by discussing the vital elements involved in building a quality website.
Nowadays many people believe that anyone can build a website. Sure there are many free website building tools out there that allow you to create a basic web presence through using plain and standardized site templates. However these quick fixes don’t provide the graphic design, software development and robust security expertise that every organisation needs.
Your website is an investment - Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) $560,000 website development project in 2015 made headlines. While the cost for the MBIE project is still considered extravagant, even in the quality website world, it proves the point that a lot goes into building a quality website.
Here are some of the vital elements that are involved in your website’s development:
Research and Planning
Often the most seamless and simple looking websites are a result of hours of planning and research. A qualified designer is in tune with all of the latest trends when it comes to the look and feel of websites, and more specifically which trends are applicable to your organisation’s objectives.
Your website designer will consider important factors such as information architecture and navigation and align it with both your creative brief and the best website trends in order to ensure maximum usability, ease of accessibility and overall user experience.
Design that suits your specific needs
To follow on from the research and planning stage, your Expert designer will design and build the high-quality customised and mobile-responsive webpages that you seek.
The ability to fuse specific functional and aesthetic needs is something that can’t be found when using free standardized templates.
Custom-built Functionality
What functions will your website need to serve? Will the site need a secure place for members to access? A unique transaction method? An automated invoicing process? Maybe it needs some sophisticated accreditation tools?
With an experienced software developer you can share your vision of the prospective site and then they will assess and determine how this can be built into customised software solutions.
Robust Security
One of the most concerning issues with using free website building and hosting is the myriad of security vulnerabilities that accompany them. Offerings that are free or cheap are so for a reason – cost savings are made by severely compromising security. It costs a lot to establish proper backup systems and Disaster Recovery sites. This is where the free/cheap offerings save money by not addressing these vitally important issues.
This is primarily because a free or cheaply built website would typically be built using unreliable open-source software program (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla). The source code of open-source software can be accessed by anyone, including hackers, or those with malicious intent.
Safeguarding your credibility
An enduring measure that any professional web designer or developer ensures is that your complete website has been tested and meets all of the agreed requirements before it goes live.
As well as meeting your site requirements, the final product should make it easy for you to maintain the site in the future and should also comply with official World Wide Web (W3C) standards and, if applicable, current government web standards.
Essentially, the value of having a customised quality website built by experts is that you’ll receive the security and flexibility that your organisation needs to thrive in our fast paced internet age.
If you’d like to know more about the website building process get in touch with us at us@expert.services