Are you curious how website projects happen at our WordPress website agency? WebDevStudios (WDS) has a solid project life cycle that can typically be broken down into phases. These highly-focused phases will get you from the initial proposal to a brand new WordPress website for your company. Our standard project life cycle will not only ensure that your project requirements are outlined up front, but that our design and development team have a solid understanding to reach your project goals. Here is a breakdown of the phases and what to expect during the project life cycle of your new WordPress website.
Strategy & Planning
Once we have a signed proposal/contract, our Strategy team is ready to start gathering requirements. The project strategy and planning phases is the information gathering process designed to dig deep into the details of what is important to a client’s business, target audience, industry, and the project proposed. This phase sets the momentum for the project life cycle of your new WordPress website.
Through a series of phone calls, our team outlines features, user stories, and technical requirements. Scope and depth of research will differ from project to project based on the proposal, but the results are the same: valuable information that will help to define the final project plan and budget.
Design
At WDS, the design phase is the process of envisioning and defining solutions for our clients via a sequence of steps to enable our digital designer to describe all aspects of the project/website. We partner with our clients to plan their products’ information architecture and user experience from the ground up through user flows, user personas, and wire framing.
The design phase of the project life cycle of your new WordPress website is thorough and will consider accessibility, scalability and performance when creating the style guide and mock-ups. Every client is unique and the digital designer will help to define the design phase per project based on client requirements and information gathered during strategy and planning.
Data Migration
If you are moving from another content management system, or want a fresh WordPress install, your website will require data migration. The data migration phase typically starts by providing WDS access to your database or your database files. With access to your database, our development team pulls together a data mapping document, writes a data migration script, and starts the import process.
Once we complete the initial import into our development environment, we do a quality assurance review against the data mapping document to ensure all content imported correctly. Our development team will be working with your actual data during the development process to ensure the launch process goes seamless.
Development
Once we have the final approved designs and project plan, our engineering team is ready to start programming your website. This phase for the project life cycle of your new WordPress website focuses on building all global elements, content modules, and/or page templates using WordPress coding standards. Our team will code custom features and functionality based on your project requirements using custom code and plugins. Additionally, throughout the development phase, our lead engineers perform code reviews on all features to ensure proper sanitization, caching, and security are in place.
Quality Assurance (QA) / User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Review
Once all development tasks are complete, our development team performs cross browser and device testing to ensure responsiveness and accessibility are in place. We run your new custom theme through our WDS theme check plugin. Our development team also runs a query monitor and report to ensure that the website is performant prior to launch.
Launch
Each new website project that we work on has a unique launch plan. Typically, the following steps are taken during this phase to move the site from our development environment to your staging and production environment:
- The lead engineer sets up staging and production environments on your host and sets up deployments.
- We will then request a content freeze in order to start the final data migration process.
- Once the site has been moved over to your environment and a quality assurance test has been completed, you will be ready to switch the domain DNS/cpanel.
- And… your new WordPress website is now live for your company and users!
Support
At WDS, we guarantee our development work by providing a support phase after project completion. We use this time to squash any minor bugs or issues that came up during launch and make certain that your company is happy with your new website. We also offer extended or ongoing support and maintenance options for our clients.
Overall, WDS has set the standard for managing website design and development projects. Our goal is to partner with your team and provide a quality WordPress website based on your goals and requirements. If you’re ready to start your project, contact us today!
