Website Designing : Methodology

Our system development process follows a number of standard or company specific frameworks, methodologies, modeling tools and languages. The Software development life cycle comes with some standards which fulfill the needs of any development team. Like software, web sites are also be developed with certain methods with some changes and additions with the existing software development process. Let us see the steps that we follow in web site development.

1. Analysis:

Once a client starts discussing about their requirements, our team starts working on it. The website being a part of the system the complete analysis on the website is very necessary. The few aspects like, how is the website going the help in the business, how well is it going to join the existing system and the most important aspect of all is the targeted audience are studied. For e.g. If an ABC company is in need of a website to have its details online, the analysis team may make use of the existing data and the resources. The team then comes up with the complete cost-benefit analysis and the plan for the project is the output of analysis. To achieve this our analyst consult the designers, developers and testers to come up with a realistic plan.

Actions taken for the complete analysis:

Interviews with the clients, Mails and supporting documents by the client, Discussions Notes, Online chat, recorded telephone conversations, Model sites/applications etc.are collected,

The output of the first step:
1. Work plan, 2. Cost involved 3. Team requirements 4. Hardware-software requirements, 5. Supporting documents and 6. The approval.

2. Specification Building :

Preliminary specifications are drawn up by covering up each and every element of the requirement. Modules of the site including general layout, site navigation and dynamic parts of the site are included in the specification. After reviewing and approving the preliminary document, a written proposal is prepared, outlining the scope of the project including responsibilities, timelines and costs.

Actions required for the specification building: Reports from the analysis team

Output: Complete requirement specifications to the individuals and the customer/customer’s representative

3. Design and development:

Once the specification building is done, the next stage of design and development starts. According to the collected information and requirements, the layouts and navigation is designed. The feedback from the customers is regularly taken and the changes are made before moving to the next stage or phase. The revisions are redisplayed for the client to view .

Input: Requirement specification

Output: Site design with templates, Images and prototype

4. Content writing:

The contents of the website are sorted, formatted, arranged and added on the website. The grammatical and the spelling mistakes are checked and corrected in this stage.

Input : Designed template

Output: Site with formatted content

5. Coding:

The programmers then come into the main frame in this stage. They take good care that the coding is done, keeping the look and the feel of the design intact. The designers and the developers interact with each other to make the design more dynamic as well as appealing.

Input: The site with forms and the requirement specification

Output : Database driven functions with the site, Coding documents

6. Promotion:

Promotion is preparation of meta tags, constant analysis and submittion of the URL to the search engines and directories. The site promotion is normally an ongoing process as the strategies of search engine may change quite often. If the customer is willing, then paid click and paid submissions can also be done with additional cost

Input: Site with content, Client mails mentioning the competitors

Output: Site submission with necessary meta tag preparation

7. Maintenance and Updating:

Web sites are quite frequently updated to keep them very fresh. In that case we do analysis again, and all the other life cycle steps will repeat. Bug fixes are done during the time of maintenance. Once the web site is operational, ongoing promotion, technical maintenance, content management & updating, site visit activity reports, staff training and mentoring done on a regular basis depending on the complexity of the web site and the needs within your organization.

We at KKE Info Media follow a team based methodology. When we a get a contract for making a website, a team is selected for making the website keeping in view the type of the website.

We have groups formed in KKE Info Media called the Feedback Groups. They consists of experts and others who have less knowledge about browsing websites.

Once the design is finalised, we ask the groups to browse the website on our intranet web server. Immediately after the experience of browsing the website, they are give a questionnaire, wherein they need to comment on various key points of the website. We also have discussions in some cases so as to improve the website.

We ask one group to be like an experienced visitor or probable customer and we get their feedback on how they feel while browsing the website. We sometimes have conflicts in the groups itself. This shows that all visitors have different psychology and a good website for one may not be for another.

For Ex. A person who loves Rock Band websites may not like Classical Piano Musicians websites and the same goes for the reverse. These two music style websites, disctintly differ in design and so is the mind of the visitor.

This practice has been followed since almost 5 years now and all the clients have liked it very much. Finally after all this we follow the middle path, satisfying all the groups.