Every website planted on the Internet unfortunately do not grow. Some never get planted, some simply fail to grow, some struggle for a while and then disappear, and only a few happen to stay, grow and prosper. There are several factors playing role to filter the best websites to reach the top of the competition and be successful.
First and most important factor is understanding what is the Web Life Cycle. Only if you take your website through a healthy life cycle it will grow and be fruitful. Web success rate is only 5% when hundreds and thousands of websites are launched every day.
Let’s discuss step by step the Web Life Cycle:
1. Planning
A website need to have a clear plan of action. Its purpose, its features, and how it will serve its Target Users. Based on the plan a Domain Name following your Brand Theme is required. The concept of the website should be focused on its ideology and the whole website should be in the same theme.
Market competition analysis is very important to understand where our Web Service can make the difference. More also it help us analyze how people are currently working in the industry.
The plan should include a time line, investment budget, and third party resources and services required to make it happen.
2. Vendor Selection
Vendors are available everywhere, from our neighborhood to friends at Facebook. Building a website is not a myth anymore, however a professional and high impact website requires much more efforts and skills.
You should contact multiple web development parties, by sending them your website requirement plan. You can send them a summary of your project and see what they propose you and for how much. Contacting vendors having experience in your industry help you to make a decision.
Vendor and technology selection is the backbone of the website’s future. By having a comparison between multiple suggestions, technologies, and proposals, you can help decide your best partner for the development or setup of the website. Single or multiple vendors may work on a web project.
Many of the website technologies such as shopping carts to social media portals are available ready made under free Opensource licensing. However for certain projects custom web development might work best. The solution is different form person to person, and destiny is different for everyone.
3. Testing & Setup
Once the website is ready, it should be tested by normal users to get necessary feedback to know if its ready to use. Usability testing does not cost much but can help in a big way. Many websites are never tested properly before they are launched. There are several testing methods and techniques which include multiple browsers testing, multiple operating systems and screen sizes testing. Website security testing etc.
Once everything is working okay the site is placed online.
Until this time, we are so exhausted with fixing all that HTML, hosting and DNS things. Most of us think that this is it and the job is done. Now the website will make a lot of money. While this is just the start of the cycle, the actual life cycle which will grow the website is yet to start.
4. Internet Public Relations, Social Media, & Marketing
Introduce your website through various social media sites on the Internet such as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Exchange links with your related sites. Go to other famous (high traffic) forums related to your industry and discuss issues with people there. Tweet about your business and activities. Engage with people by all means and perform an energetic campaign to build your public relations over the Internet.
You will get a lot of feedback from the social media about your website and how can you improve it further. Remember, nothing is perfect, and everything needs enhancements to grow.
There are unlimited activities you can perform on the Internet and also offline in the real world for the marketing and development of your website into a successful project for you.
5. Monitoring & Maintenance
There are several paid and free tools available to monitor websites. Best of them which we like is Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. These tools let you monitor your website very closely to identify errors and also help in search engine rankings.
This monitoring let us know what people like and not in our website. The statistics include a lot of information such as where the traffic on the website is coming from, which pages are they viewing, from which pages people leave the website etc. All this information help us to decide what changes and enhancements we need to make.
6. Enhancements & Upgrades
All websites need continues enhancements and upgrades. These must be performed in order to provide fresh information on the website. Fix problems and issues disturbing the audience.
A website which is never updated, offers no interest to its viewers. Users of a website need it to have something new every time they come back.
Introduce new features, and segments in the website as per your business plan made initially. Provision for the growth of the website is very important while building the website initially. Do not make the mistake of getting a static website, a dynamic website can help you grow, by adding more pages time to time. For example a blog can have as many pages as we want.
The process of growth is continues. We keep on moving between 4th, 5th and 6th step of continues promotion, monitoring and upgrades of the website. More we do these steps, further it will take us. Its simple!
Help: Genex Business