Website development workflow
- Brainstorm features and goals for your site. Everything goes, just make sure it gets captured. Preferably on a big whiteboard, which is where synergy really comes in to play.
- Focus and refine your scope for the current iteration. Ruthlessly eliminate everything that is not absolutely essential. If the business will survive without it, you probably don’t need it yet.
- Tell stories with your features. Come up with a step by step narration in plain language of how a user is going to interact with your focused feature set.
- Diagram the flow of functionality based on your user stories. A simple mind map is a very helpful tool to plan and track progress.
- Draw wireframe sketches, ignoring details, to get the big concepts down on paper. Revisit steps 2-4 as needed.
- Develop plain HTML mockups, with no style or branding, just to see how all your ideas fit on a screen and whether any adjustments need to be made to accommodate browsers.
- Develop a functional interface with enough back end in place to make real changes. Now we’re working with real software and getting a sense of its usability.
- Polish it up by developing some layout comps using your overall identity, branding, and website style guide.
- Release it and start getting feedback from real users. Next week, start over at step 1. Have fun!
For most of these steps you only need three people: a designer, a developer, and the client. Some of these steps need even fewer. This is a great workflow to be comfortable with. I like to run through this process as often as I can, at least once every two weeks if not more frequently.