Steps to Create a High Quality Website

What you need are goals, content, structure, design, programming and maintenance. What you need is expertise – constantly. This article outlines – without attempting to be comprehensive – the ten most important steps to create a good website.

1. Commitment
2. Planning
3. Information Architecture
4. Design
5. Programming
6. Quality Assurance
7. Public Relations
8. Success Control
9. Maintenance
10. Quality Assurance

1. Commitment

A high-quality website requires a lot of commitment and effort. Good content requires a lot of commitment and effort. Your users and visitors demand commitment and effort.

2. Planning
You have decided that you really want a website and that this website should really be of an acceptable standard. What you need to do now is a plan:

What is the goal of your website ?
What is the target audience of your website ?
What content do you intend to offer ?
Which key data and metrics will you use to determine your success? (Determine your key performance indicators.)

If you are in any doubts or even fail to find an answer to one of the questions, you probably need a break. Or you could try to seek for help regarding your decisions. Your website won’t mind the wait.

3. Information Architecture

After the planning phase has been completed, don’t immediately start designing and implementing: First, you need to create, test, verify, and reconsider the structure and architecture of your offer. To do this, read a good book about information architecture, look at a few heuristics and have at least 15 users do some card-sorting.

4. Design

Consider a few points before you start the design process:

. It doesn’t hurt to have a look at a few principles, whether specific ones by Tufte or Tognazzini or abstract ones like the golden ratio or wabi-sabi.
. It is essential to keep accessibility in mind, even during the design phase. It is easy to address color blindness, photosensitive epilepsy or sufficient contrast during this stage.
. Test your drafts (don’t wait until the final version). Carry out tests, whether with five users, with more than five because that’s not enough, with n users, just as long as it is cheap, or with none because you place your trust in experts. Test and read through basic rules about usability.

5. Programming

After completing the design process, which should have led to a well operating design, you can now start the implementation. (It is, however, possible, that you start this at an earlier stage already.) In addition to environment (server) and dynamics (script languages), you need to consider the following points:

6. Quality Assurance

After having worked out an elaborate, high-quality information offer on the basis of the aforementioned points, you should still absolutely and definitely carry out Quality Assurance (QA). The launch of your offer is part of this phase, ideally after a final QA. It may be possible to launch your website immediately after having carried out the QA, but only if you have focused on quality from the beginning.

7. Public Relations

Market your website without feeling guilty. Your HTML should already be suitable for search engines (semantics and accessibility). Use a moderate link strategy from this point on and perform conventional Public Relations (PR).

8. Success Control

Make sure that the “key performance indicators( KPI ) you determined at the beginning are measured. If your existing statistics don’t determine these numbers, ensure that they do. There are some useful statistics tools: Google Analytics, Mint, WebSideStory. Use these metrics to evaluate the development and the success of your offer.

9. Maintenance

Maintain your website. Update your website. Look after your website. Add new content on a regular basis.

10 Quality Assurance

That’s right, quality assurance is a process. Keep validating, checking, and testing your documents, contents, and design … again and again.

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10 Steps to Create a High-Quality Website