Conceptualizing a Website

Every business these days wants to have a presence on WWW; the main objective is to be able to target the global market and creating a profile of the company, which can be accessed by anyone from anywhere! This is opened many opportunities for the business involved in designing & development of websites, and depending upon the size of the business processes and approach for deploying a web based application changes. Which is very fair because everyone has his/her style of working and making deliverables, if the process & approach does not include all the basic steps of a software development life cycle it leads to the problems like – deadlines are not met and the scope of the work changes as the work progresses.

The clients might not be tech & internet savvy so they are not able to visualize how their site will look like and when they get the first demo of the application that is being developed for them it acts as the food for thought. They then try to relate it with what they are looking at and there business model. As a result they expect some changes to be done to the features or the style in which the information is being displayed on the website. Which results into requirement of additional time and effort for accommodating such things, and leads to the above mentioned problems.

There is a believe that anyone can start delivering web based services and can keep the cost low by not hiring people who actually are skilled to accomplish this task. The thought originates a company with the problems of delivering work which is not quality and ending up with unhappy customers.

Why this happens?

The root of the problem is conceptualization – Providers do not well conceptualize the requirement and get started with the production. This way the client does not get anything to see but they directly see the first demo. Providers should conceptualize the requirement and should compile documents like -

a) High Level Features / Pages document – The purpose of this document is to list the pages / features that will be designed / developed for the website. This is of great assistance to the clients to know what will be delivered and how it will be functioning.

b) Wire frames – This will be a skeleton of the complete website, which helps clients in visualizing how the pages of there website will look like.

c) Approach & Milestones – The purpose of this document is to inform client the order in which the production will happen and what are milestones of this development process, a good scheduling of work may even have specific delivery dates with each milestone.

Apart from the benefits of these documents to the client there are certain benefits of these documents to the provider and its team:

a) Exact estimation of the effort that will be required, which will assist them in evaluating the exact cost for this effort
b) Complete understanding of the requirement before the production has started
c) Being on the same page as client while developing pages of the website
d) Meeting the timelines
e) Ensuring the deliverable is a quality product
f) Most Important – You will have a happy & a satisfied client

To conclude I would say providers should ensure that they do conceptualization of every web based project they work on and the buyers should ask questions to providers ‘How they will conceptualize my project and what will be the approach?’

Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based application. It could be web design, web development, SEO or SEM. This not just enables him to develop & promote any website rather also enables him to act as a consultant for his clients to convert their requirement into a workable solution. Now he is heading a Web Design & Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.