A Complete Guide to the 7 Phases of Web Development Life Cycle

Today, web development is all the rage. It has become critical for organizations to have a well-functioning website or web application to meet their consumers’ digital needs. Almost every business, regardless of industry, is focused on developing a well-designed website to sell its services.

However, the web development process is more than just code. With a hundred factors to consider, it’s critical to follow a disciplined method to avoid difficulties.

A web app development life cycle is a systematic approach to achieving excellent results. To create a unique website, you should follow the seven phases of the web development life cycle.

We’ll go through all of the phases of web application development in depth, elaborating on each step of the website development checklist.

Web Development Layers

Backend development, often known as server-side development, encompasses all of a website’s procedures behind the scenes. The backends’ key components are database management, server administration, and logical component management.

These aren’t visible to visitors, yet without a solid backend development team, your website will be a blank page incapable of doing any operations.

Client-Side

This layer, often known as the front-end, is responsible for the site’s visual appearance and design. Frontend developers employ CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to provide a seamless user experience through responsive web pages. Your website will not be able to attract clients if it does not have a nice user interface.

Full Stack 

Full-Stack development encapsulates the entire web development process by combining the frontend and backend. You work on the whole stack of activities and technologies involved in the website development cycle at this layer.

A full-stack engineer is skilled in UI-UX design, database management, server hosting, and browser code.

Together, these three levels make up the web development life cycle. For both website and web application development, the process is the same.

It’s critical to understand the web application development cycle if you or your team are working on a web project.

What is the Life Cycle of Web Development?

A web development life cycle refers to all the steps involved in creating a website, from conceptualization through coding and design to deployment and maintenance. It is the normal or systematic procedure to follow to create a functional website.

It provides a basic template for a web developer and project manager to follow to guarantee that mistakes are minimized, and the best outcomes are achieved.

The seven steps of the web development cycle are as follows:

  • Research
  • Planning
  • Designing
  • generation of content
  • Development
  • Testing
  • Maintenance.
  1. The Research and Analysis Phases of the Web Development Life Cycle

The majority of individuals overlook this crucial stage of the web-building process. Gathering information about the project and the customer is critical for ensuring that your design and development are on track.

Your developers won’t be able to give the best solution unless they clearly understand what they’re working on and what the requirements are.

During the information collection stage, you should ask yourself or your clients the following questions:

It’s crucial to imagine who your website will be catering to throughout this stage. Set goals and create requirement elicitation papers, considering their age, gender, interests, and requirements. Surveying users and collecting input on what difficulties they’re having and what solutions they’re searching for is frequently effective.

You must evaluate your web app concepts to discover if they are practical and lucrative.

If this step is skipped, the rest of the web development process will be rendered useless and fail to achieve the desired results.

  1. Strategy and Planning

All website components, including design, technology, content, and marketing, are strategized during the planning stage. Informed decisions on the structure and features of the website are made based on the information obtained and assessed in the previous step.

During the planning phase, a dedicated team is created, with each member assigned a specific task and a defined function.

Before building a website, you must decide on the content structure, wireframes (schematics and preliminary designs), technology stack, and software development approach.

A technology stack is a collection of computer languages, web frameworks, and software used to create any web application.

The Planning phase also includes creating a sitemap, forecasting schedules, defining deliverables, and allocating resources. Finally, before going on to the Design step, you must decide on your website’s branding.

  1. Wireframing and design

The web design stage involves the creation of a website layout and the involvement of innovative UI-UX designers.

The layout entails creating a primary draft, which might be graphical, to gain a sense of the website’s style. The layout’s objective is to give an information structure to your clients, allowing them to take a visual tour of the material and basic features.

To construct a foundation layout for the website, the wireframe produced in the previous step is translated into buttons, tabs, menus, dashboards, color themes, typography, and images.

Design an interactive website that responds to their interests and wants, keeping the target audience’s study in mind. Make sure that your website or application doesn’t grow stale. Use images, colors, and other media to attract viewers while staying true to your website’s branding and purpose.

  1. Creating Content

Finally, substance reigns supreme. No amount of beautiful design will help you if you are unable to interact with your clients and readers.

The primary goal of the content generation stage is to establish a communication channel via the user interface.

Content creation entails presenting helpful information about your firm in an appealing, easy-to-understand fashion. Throughout the web development lifecycle, calls to action, clever headlines, formatting, line editing, composing, and updating texts are all done.

This phase focuses on branding and promoting your website or web app, as well as allowing you to establish the goal of your website through content creation.

Because content is the only method to communicate with end users and convert them into clients, pay close attention to their issues and the answers you can provide.

  1. Development and Coding

The development phase is where the website is built. In this stage, the client-side and server-side of the website are developed. It’s the most time-consuming step in the website creation process.

  • Front-end Web design and development

The early phases of web design are translated into interactive features on the web page. Web designers use web frameworks and development tools to incorporate components and functionalities into the website skeleton.

The web designer uses HTML, CSS, and a scripting language, usually JavaScript, to produce a user-friendly webpage. Bootstrap and Foundation are the frontend frameworks of choice for most online projects for HTML and CSS development.

Several front-end frameworks for JavaScript are available on the market. (For more details, see our blog on the top frontend frameworks for web development.)

A mobile-based equivalent of your website is also advised if you want to keep up with the newest industry trends. It’s a good idea to include mobile-friendly components in your website design or create a mobile application.

  • Web Development on the Backend

This step entails creating the web app’s real functionalities. The front-end is in charge of designing the visual elements and interfacing with the user, whereas the back-end is in charge of coding the instructions that make each element do the required functions.

The process of designing a server-side program, generating databases, implementing application logic, and integrating server and client-side functionalities are referred to as server-side. During this stage, developers employ a variety of technologies and programming languages. Backend engineers’ responsibilities have recently expanded to include Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Including these characteristics can help your site rank higher in search engines like Google.

  1. Quality Control and Testing

Following the development of the website, a series of rigorous tests are carried out to ensure that any defects in the system are eliminated. The QA team painstakingly tests the web app’s functionality, usability, compatibility, and performance using methodologies such as Unit testing, Stress testing, Integration Testing, and Load testing.

Project consistency is critical to have a well-functioning site that delivers a smooth user experience. It’s also vital to test the functionality of all features across all devices and platforms.

Aside from that, modest modifications like plugins and SEO optimization should be made to guarantee a seamless launch. Testing engineers and developers collaborate in a loop until the QA team certifies that the final website is ready to go live.

To prevent wasting money and effort later on, we recommend commencing the testing process as soon as feasible. Allow the QA team to write tests in parallel with the wireframing. This way, you won’t need as many testing and development iterations, and you won’t have to make any substantial design adjustments.

  1. Maintenance and Deployment

The website or app is ultimately ready for distribution once the QA team approves. The software is hosted on online servers and accessible to visitors using the File Transfer Protocol.

But the job isn’t done yet. Continuous user interaction feedback informs you of potential areas for development. As a result, the web application development life cycle is followed to make the required changes.

Aside from that, frequent maintenance and upgrades are essential to keep the site running well and attracting new visitors.

The day-to-day upkeep of your website may fall into your hands whether you hire a web development business or bespoke website developers. In such circumstances, make sure you don’t overlook post-deployment maintenance services.

Each part of the web development life cycle is critical, no matter how small or large the project is.

Although coding is a crucial part of any software development project, other aspects of web development, including design, content production, security checks, and quality assurance team testing, should not be overlooked.

The lifetime of website development is a never-ending adventure that may be improved daily.

Do you want to know how much your website project will cost? To estimate your budget, read our comprehensive guide to web app development costs.

Conclusion

Web application development is a lengthy process that necessitates following a series of procedures to get satisfactory outcomes. According to their project, each firm deviates from the normal web development timeframe, adding or subtracting important phases.

You can alter the web development process depending on your project management strategy. However, acquiring essential data and sufficient preparation is critical for every website development project.

Do you need a specialist web development firm that understands your requirements?

You may contact Monocubed for guided assistance in designing the right bespoke website for you from our skilled development team.