What started as a simple website development has taken a large pie of market share. Let me start with the literal meaning of website development - starting from the baseline, Offshore + Web + Site + Development in simple terms means developing, coding for your website and making web page available on the web and later offshoring your website services. Or you can say, website development means developing a website and making it available on the World Wide Web to promote your product and services and contribute to global information base.

Basically web development follows web design phase and spans from coding for simple static web pages to complex applications pages, complete website development lifecycle needs to be monitored with caution. Web Development is one of the fastest growing industry in this IT edge. Graphics designer, web editor, flash developer, designers all together look into the requirement, i.e. requirement analysis is must and then step into development and coding phase, development is not design but coding for design template.

Web Development cost depends on various factors: complexity of design, content of the website. With advancement in technology, technology has gifted developers with many free web development tools like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that will bring down your development cost, CMS (Content Management System - Typo3, Joomla), WYSIWYG, all these help to control, edit, manage contents with having in-depth knowledge of the softwares. With the Microsoft product Dot.Net has enabled to run applications online.

With digitalization of world and integration of various modules separated geographically all changes are reflected dynamically in this real world and fetching information is easy these days. E-commerce is best example for this that lets visitors to shop online, all transactions being managed from the backend; you just enjoy shopping, placing orders without bothering about its other side happening. Emerging social networking sites are another set of examples of web development that influenced the worldwide communication network and helped disseminating useful information among members of the communities.

Starting with the generic web template and moving towards customized web templates we get benefits like more clarity and better placement of various web components, more flexibility in functionality and presentation of website, its look and feel can be improved. Many firms these days specialize in providing custom web site development solutions for all size of business that helps you to promote your website's product and services and improve traffic. Security, software testing are important aspects that follow website development. Quality web services promise to take your business to new level of business.

Web Development covers different areas:

Client Side Coding for layout and design that includes: CSS - Cascading Style Sheets is used to describe presentation of document written in markup language. Flash - Adobe flash player (most popular) is used to create content for movies, games, mobile phones Javascript - is a scripting language used for client side web development XHTML - Extensible Hyper text Markup Language is an application of XML

Server Side Coding for website functionality and back end system that includes:

ASP and MySQL- ASP.NET and MySQL CGI and Perl Cold Fusion Java, J2EE PHP and MySQL Python Ruby

Looking inside the website development phase:

First step is Analysis, studying and understanding client's requirement, base requirement of the website, its target market and audience, its benefits over the existing system, its incorporation with the existing system with the help of chat, documents, discussions. Every plan should be realistic and based on certain real figures like resources involved, documents needed, hardware and software requirement, cost involved, manpower and finally the cost benefit.

Second step is Building Specification; the base specifications are withdrawn from the requirement analysis report. All the real information gathered in the analysis phase are used for building requirement specification. After requirement specification preliminary document is sent for approval then a written proposal is made and scope and effort estimation is also prepared.

Third step Design & Development, in this step after requirement specification and getting all proposal documents, contract documents and money signed for, and graphics and layouts specification documents from client we move to design phase.

Customer/client can be in touch, by sending e-mails, feedback, can send comment using contact us form, for very urgent message can use facsimile services or can contact directly through telephones.

Before actual design is finalized, design and layout are designed as a prototype with different variations offering customer with choice. Customer can be offered full prototype with interactivity, based on customer feedback lots of changes may be required to make. All the required changes should be made and all problems should be fixed before moving ahead.

Test plan is major milestone in this step which needs to be developed during design phase to assure quality. Finally site template, design, images are sent for client approval.

Fourth step involves writing quality, theme content for the website. This is very crucial from visitor's point as the site needs to be very informative and theme related and this will in real drive your website as these days websites are quality content driven. Content writer can use template finalized in the design step.

Moving to the coding step, it is developers turn now but before proceeding developers should understand the design code and navigation and proceed in a way so that design code, template look and feel is retained. If needed, developers may interact with designers for proper co-ordination and better understanding the design template. Coding team should also generate test plans to check all forms and field and make development step bug free and maintain integrity with different segments. Development team uses the SRS (Software Requirement Specification) or FSD (Functional Specification Documentation) that are prepared by technical writer and approved by client as a guide that speeds up the over all process. At the other end coding team can prepare document for end-user that can be used for preparing user manuals and help guides.

Testing is an important step in development of a website. Whether automated testing or manual testing both are important and mandatory. Many online testing tools and online free testing tools are available for testing various applications. White box, black box testing and application testing is done. Also application is tested if it can run on different browsers and similar other functionalities are tested. Finally live testing after website is made available online is carried.

Website needs to be promoted and it should reach the potential customers once it is online. With the changing search engine strategies website design should be search engine friendly (designers at the beginning should take care otherwise it may become difficult to optimize the website). Website promotion is an ongoing strategy, first step is competitor analysis, target market research, keyword selection for targeting the market, then websites are initially submitted to directories and submission continues at regular interval.

Websites need to be maintained and update, as search engine always index sites that have new information to offer, else your site will gradually faint away. Regular analysis and bug fixing is part of this maintenance process. This also involves educating; training team members to meet challenges and keep themselves update with the knowledge of the emerging latest technologies and meet the challenges of tomorrow.

Highlights in true prospect include web engineering and re-engineering and quality and timeliness will be the resultant for your product and services. For more information on website development and offshore web site development feel free to contact us any time

About the Author

Rakhi, is a SEO content writer at Development India. Development India is a website development Company in India and a leading provider of offshore website development services.