Website Development Requirements Checklist 2021

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Website Development Requirements Checklist 2021
Today we have easy access to the Internet, thanks
to the proliferation of mobiles. It has given
birth to new categories of web users and expanded
the target audience for the businesses. Despite
the increased mobile presence in the form of
mobile apps, mobile-friendly responsive web
presence is gaining momentum. Moreover, the
advent of the technologies has made web
development complex enough that one or two
freelancers are proving inadequate and demanding
a team of web designers, web programmers, quality
assurance developers, UX designers, and
marketing professionals with high-end web
development infrastructural facilities. Therefore,
everybody is looking for an established web
development company with a solid portfolio and
adequate infrastructural facilities to foster
creativity and collaboration to work on high-end
web development projects from offshore
clients. Apart from these, there is a website
development checklist that a client looking for
website development must consider prior to
jumping on signup for the web design project.
Lets have a look at the below-listed website
requirements checklist.
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35 Things to Know Before Building a Website
There are plenty of things that demand the
attention of website owners and
website developers prior to beginning, and during
the website development process, but we can
restrict up to 30 technical requirements for
building a website, which is highly important to
know.
1) Target Audience Analysis

• Without the strategy, no business can achieve its
  goals. To develop an effective website strategy,
  you must define website goals and carry audience
  analysis.
• Today audience research and analysis carried out
  scientifically, and it is by developing user
  persona. By definition, a user persona is a
  fictional character/s communicating the primary
  characteristics of group/s of users. Therefore,
  user persona consisting of
• Demography Consisting of the data of age,
  gender, education, occupation for the B2C
  audience. For B2B, company size, position, and
  company role are
• important data
• Psychographic Goals, tasks, and motivation
• Web-o-graphics web experiences, usage location,
  OS platforms, use frequency, favorites, social
  media, and many other user preferences on the web
• Thus, developing a website keeping your user
  persona in mind may grant you definite success.

2) Set a Deadline
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Designing the website alone can take up a huge
chunk of your time if you dont plan things
properly. You need to set daily and weekly
targets/deadlines for particular areas of your
website to be done to avoid being overwhelmed.
This way your website can be ready on schedule.
3) Choosing a Domain Name

• The selection of a domain name/URL for your
  website requires consideration of four
  perspectives, such as
• Human Perspective
• Should be easy to read, speak, and remember
• Readability
• Brand Perspective
• Domain extension depending on the nature of
  business, county, or business genre
• -Make it unique to stand out
• SEO Perspective
• Relevance
• Containing business keyword/s
• Legal Perspective
• Copyright and Trademark issues

4) Selection of Host
Fast loading is an important factor in search
engine ranking. Hosting services have greater
impacts on the loading performance. Besides
these, hosting influencing many other website
success factors.
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• Therefore, the selection of web hosts is crucial,
  and only your web developers can offer the right
  technical help to show a way to cut through
  hosting jargon and allow you to make an informed
  decision.
• Costs of hosting packages with decent ROI in mind
• Area of hosting specialization
• Consider tech specs
• Check the scope of tech support in real-time
  during emergencies
• Look at additional features and add-ons
• Hardware capabilities
• Check the reputation of the hosting company
  through third-party customer review sites and
• testimonials
• Email features
• Control panel offerings
• Scalability
• Today we have advanced hosting technologies in
  the form of VPS and Cloud Hosting apart from
  shared hosting. Therefore, ask your web
  developers to select the right and affordable
  option for you.

5) Prototyping

• We know before reaching the final design
  acceptance in the web development process,
  wireframe development and design prototype
  development are significant steps and almost all
  development methodologies are following those
  steps essentially.
• Today, we have advanced technologies for
  prototyping tools, which provide
• interactive prototypes with additional advantages
  like act as a real website and allow pointing
  device to touch gesture to operate on mobiles

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• Prototype depicts the hierarchy of pages and
  sub-pages as per your content
• architecture or navigational architecture
• Prototypes should provide room for client
  feedback and should be client-centric in all
  manner
• It should address the following queries
• Purpose of the website
• The audience of the site
• User journey to attend user goals
• Mingle the user goals with website goals

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Prototyping is an iterative process, so you have
to limit the number of iteration considering
design options and affordability in the sense of
effort, time, and resources spent on the
prototype design process.
6) Right Design
After approval of prototypes by the client, g
raphic designers take the final design step by
shifting the design in Photoshop or Illustrator
like designing software where low-fidelity and
high-fidelity design mockup development
involved. Final design in designing software
provides the simulation of final web pages and
modern designing software to take care of
slicing, exporting, and HTML/CSS version
development.
7) The Latest Coding

• The programming stage of website development is
  important to develop source code that makes the
  website live, dynamic, and interactive. There are
  several best coding standards such as
• Making code clean by removing unconventional and
  unwanted code. For
• instance, right indentations improve code
  readability and ease modifications
• Make code comprehensive for any level of skilled
  web developers by inserting only essential
  comments
• Follow naming conventions and keep code simple by
  applying simple logic
• Dont follow hard-coded value practices, instead
  keep code portable
• Keep code testing at frequent intervals and use
  code auto-correction tools

8) Advanced Navigation
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Apply different navigation schemes according to
the complexities of your website, such as main
navigation menu, site navigation, and footer
navigation, off-canvas navigation in mobiles,
bread crumb navigation, and on-site search engine
for advanced search.

• Keep the following things in mind while designing
  the website navigation
• It should be distinct, simple, consistent, and
  familiar
• It must be clear, descriptive, concise, and
  interactive by nature
• It has to ordered, styled, structured,
  accessible, clickable, silent, and shallow
• It should be visual, responsive, seamless,
  animated, sticky, scalable, and tested

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9) Smart UI Elements on Different Pages

• Use smart UI elements by following the best
  practices.
• Create effective CTA buttons to grab the
  attention of website users and entice them to
  accomplish website goals
• Design Read More and Continue Reading buttons
  or links effectively to engage and lead the
  users further in their journey
• Design attractive, creative, and user-friendly
  shopping cart icons like carts, bags, trolleys,
  buckets, and baskets to grab the attention of
  shoppers on eCommerce
• websites
• Design progress trackers, coming button soon, and
  Maps for best user experiences
• Design pricing tables quotes like block and pull
  quotes by following best trends
• Use the latest gallery for date stamps and
  calendar elements/icons
• Dont overlook error page design to convey the
  message effectively

10) Content Strategy

• A good content strategy glue the audience, and
  you must follow the following things
• Write content keeping the audience in mind
• Write content in optimum word count
• Consider messaging priorities
• Motivate the audience to take actions on CTA
  elements

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• Tabs are a nifty way for alluring content layout
  design
• Try to keep SEO content below the fold and
  prioritize users
• Give space for creativity on non-SEO pages
• Try to use natural language to support voice
  search
• Image Optimization
• Images are significant assets for creating
  stunning effects on the mind of your website
  users. Therefore, optimize images for fast
  loading without affecting their quality to give
  the best user experiences and effects. Follow
  some good tips in this regard
• Cut the file size for optimum loading
  performance, but keep mobile users in mind along
  with large desktops users
• Use right file types for maximum compatibility
  and performance
• Optimize image Meta Tags like title, description,
  and alt tag
• Produce different sizes and resolutions of an
  image to meet requirements for
• responsive web design
• Develop strategies for image dimensions and
  product angles to give the best
• customer experiences
• Use the image sprite-like techniques for fast
  loading
• Handle image thumbnails smartly
• It is better to use image site maps
• Beware of decorative images and use intelligently
• CDN use for images is good for performance but
  bad for SEO

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Google loves blistering fast websites and gives a
ranking. People are impatient by nature and
dont like waiting much so leave websites to take
more than three seconds to load despite the
display of loading animations.

• Lets see some tips to bring fast loading on your
  website
• Images are playing a big part in load
  performance. Therefore, apply the modern image
  optimization software and technologies to cut the
  image weight without missing quality
• Loading background images using external CSS
  files is the best way to avoid blots on
  bandwidth and connectivity
• Avoid inline scripts like JavaScript and CSS to
  slow down the loading
• Minify the HTML code of your website source code
  document
• Use clean, compact, and comprehensive code

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13) UX Design

• Finally, use cache technologies to improve load
  performance for your website

• Designing excellent user experiences for your
  website requires UX designers to think of
  different perspectives to solve UX problems. The
  following guidelines may help your
• website UX developers deliver stunning outcomes
• Know the expectations of your targeted audience
  and run guerilla test to find out what may work
  for them
• Keep things simple to avoid distractions
• Bring consistency in web design to offer subtle
  guidance and build trust
• Implement a visual hierarchy for highlighting the
  most important elements first and less afterward
• Typography is part of the design so choose fonts
  for different text blogs and titles carefully.
  Highlight the headers as per the importance of
  their levels right from H1 to H6. Use reverse
  type to make text stand out because contrasting
• backgrounds make text pop-out
• Colors are useful in establishing relationships
  between elements, create visual hierarchy, and
  hold the attention of onlookers in UX design for
  your website. Therefore, leverage color
  psychology in your project
• The interface on your website should be usable,
  and feedback from users is
• crucial to improve so run guerrilla as well as
  in-depth user experience tests and surveys on
  appropriate stages of web development and
  afterward

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14) Usability
Today usability is forming the basis for great
user experiences. Usability needs a user-centric
design. Therefore, usability meets the user
goals, mental models, and requirements to make
the website easy to use. For excellent
usability, you must follow some key principles of
website design.
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• Make website available and accessible by focusing
  on server uptime, broken links,
• and mobile responsiveness, for e.g. Amazon
• Clarity is at the core of usability and usability
  web designer can achieve it by infusing
  simplicity, familiarity, consistency, guidance,
  good information architecture, and direct
  feedback in the design
• Learnability
• Credibility
• Relevancy
• Features Functionality
• Today simple and static websites hardly work
  because people want to do a lot of things with
  them and their expectations are higher when the
  features and functionality of
• websites are in question. For example
• Your website should be dynamic, interactive, and
  updating content in real-time
• Your website, if with lots of web pages, should
  have an advanced search feature/engine to find
  intended content rapidly
• You should have Chatbot integrated to provide
  artificial intelligence-enabled chat
  communication to your esteemed customers
• Your website should have multimedia content to
  grab the attention of visitors and engage them
  further including high-quality images and videos
• It must be mobile-friendly and load fast to offer
  the best performance
• It has smart UI elements to offer the best user
  experiences
• If it is an eCommerce website, it must have the
  latest eCommerce features with personalization
  capabilities
• Your site should have the latest security features

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16) DIY or Professional Services?

• If your niche requires location-based features,
  you must think of GPS and other
• LBS features

Determine whether you want to build the website
on your own or would like to outsource the
design and development to professionals. There
are many DIY website builders available in the
market. These do not require any designing or
coding skills. However, there is a limit to the
extent of customization you can put your
website through by employing DIY website
builders. For a more custom website, you would
need the help of professionals. Then there is
the matter of cost. If you have a good budget and
can avoid compromising with it (and you
should!), then hiring experts can be a good start
to your road to success
17) Branding Strategy

• First define your brand message, brand
  characters, and brand components first.
• For any brand, brand logo or symbol is essential
  so go for it to the graphics designer
• Set brand theme defining brand components, such
  as colors, brand character, and brand story
• Take storytelling approaches in design and
  content if your niche is permitting
• Infuse brand theme and components in your web
  design
• Use brand element in all your online and offline
  operations such as packing, marketing material,
  and in the entire business
• Use the latest communication technologies to
  offer the best user experiences to your customer
  to augment your brand
• Use social media and other online channels to
  spread your branding messages

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18) Onboarding

• Onboarding is a user engagement technique,
  particularly for first-time users to educate
  them and leads to achieving goals of users and
  websites both. If you want to build a great
  onboarding flow, take care of the following
• Offer excellent one-time setup
• Generate excitement among users to come back
• Teach users to use a product with the best
  teaching/guiding methods like using visual
  language with multimedia content
• Use the variety of onboarding techniques to guide
  your users at different stages of the user
  journey such as tips on the cursor, hover pop-up,
  interactive modules, off-canvas notifications,
  and so many others
• Create a sense of progress during the onboarding
  process to engage yours on a long journey

19) CTA Strategies

• Effective CTA design is a vital step in the lead
  generation process. Therefore, keep the
  following things in mind while design CTA.
• Design CTA elements capable enough to grab the
  attention of visitors
• Use colors, shape, size, and white space to
  highlight the CTA elements
• Location of CTA is important and above the fold
  is the best place
• For multiple CTA elements, follow the hierarchy
  to give prominence in design using various
  design elements including colors, shape, and text

20) Content Marketing
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• Content is king so web designers cant ignore
  them while designing a successful website.
• Should have clear and effective information
  architecture content layouts
• Focus on critical content
• Grouping relevant content help visitors to scan
  it rapidly
• Keep relevancy
• Keep the target audience in mind
• Make content unique and engaging
• Use a content delivery network if possible

21) Search Engine Marketing

• Right SEO starts with SEO-friendly website
  design.
• Optimize website for fast loading so rank high
• URL should be SEO friendly and contain primary
  business keyword
• Select appropriate hosting package and hosting
  provider according to technologies and niche of
  your website
• Integrating CMS is the best option to provide
  fresh and optimized content as per need without
  any help of a developer
• Use SEO Metadata in coding and alt tags for
  images
• Follow the latest link building practices during
  content writing for web copy
• Navigation schemes should be user-friendly and
  search engine friendly
• Optimize your information architecture
• Make website mobile-friendly using various
  techniques including RWD
• Minimize scripting languages including
  JavaScript, jQuery, Media Query, and use HTML
  and CSS with best coding practices

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22) Social Media Marketing

• Social media rewards high in ranking and
  following the best SMO practices may help you a
  lot.
• Do seamless integration of social media to
  encourage sharing of your web content directly
  from the web page
• Place social media icons at appropriate places
• Select social media icons according to your
  website theme
• Develop design and content that social media
  audience love and share
• Use images, image gallery, and videos like
  multimedia content to share on social media sites

23) Compatibility
Browser compatibility and OS compatibility are a
vital issue with your website code. Test
frequently during the development and at the QA
stage. Today mobile browsers used highly so check
your mobile-friendly website for all major
mobile browsers and older versions.
24) Security Concerns
Since we are doing almost all tasks online using
various channels and website is at the center
point. A lot of data transactions taking place on
our websites including personal, financial,
business data. Moreover, our websites have
integration of web applications, web services,
LBS, IoT applications, and myriads of new tech
innovations through APIs. Therefore,
vulnerabilities are high, and we need to take
adequate measures during web programming and
designing.
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Following universal security standards and
obtaining the latest encryption technologies for
your website security are required steps towards
offering safe and secure web experiences. A
security lapse at authentication and
authorization processes are known issues.
Therefore, use the latest spam filters like
captcha and equivalent mechanism to prevent
automated bots to break your security walls and
hack the system or spread viruses. Application of
antivirus and malware prevention software is
essential on servers to prevent hacking and
different injections, and other malicious
activities.
25) Rating Reviews
Google and other search engines are prioritizing
ratings and reviews in their ranking algorithms.
Therefore, making provisions to obtaining honest
ratings and reviews makes great sense in
Internet marketing and trust-building
efforts. You can enable website users to share
your reviews on review sites to
leverage third-party services like Google and
Yelp. Schema.org offers coding to highlight your
web page ratings and reviews in SERPs.

• Testimonials
• It builds trust among the newcomers on your
  website
• It shows the skills, products, and services of
  the company indirectly
• It demonstrates the quality and level of your
  customer base
• It provides real user experience insights that
  you cannot demonstrate anyhow on your website
• The testimonial should real, honest, and with
  actual references/contact details (if requested)
• Maintenance

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• Proper maintenance of your website allows it to
  provide services in the long run and increase
  ROI.
• To ease the maintenance process, your website
  code should be comprehensive and clear so any
  level of the skilled developer can attain it
• Keep images and other multimedia content
  organized on the backend/server
• Follow the naming conventions and file management
  standards to access the required resources
  quickly
• Update content other resources regularly to keep
  the website fresh and contemporary, so the
  integration of CMS is the best option

28) Updates

• Updating websites regularly keeps your website
  contemporary and boosting the growth of your
  business and website performance.
• Keep web development technologies updated and
  install updates regularly
• Consider SEO recommendations while updating the
  site
• Update and improve search and navigation
• Check various redirects like 301, 401, and so on
• Check CTA and site speed performance
• Check links for broken link repairing

29) Sitemap

• A sitemap is a summary of the entire site and
  helps bots and users to find all web pages in a
  place.
• Keep hierarchy of pages while making the sitemap
  for front end display

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• Keep sitemap updated using the latest sitemap
  plugins, which are doing
• automatic updates of pages/links
• Keep a copy of XML sitemap for search engine
  indexing
• Give the link of the sitemap web page at the
  bottom/footer of the homepage and possible each
  page of the site
• Optimize sitemap anchor text or use titles of the
  relevant pages
• Track Performance
• Just making the website is not enough. You need
  to understand how your website is performing,
  who and how are users coming to your website.
  Search engine analytics tools are great to watch
  and analyze the site performance, traffic,
  behavior of visitors, and so many things offered
  by free and paid site analytics tools.
• Integrate Google, and Bing analytics tools at the
  backend of the website to leverage their
  offerings
• Follow analytics code integration guidelines and
  recommendations issued by the respective
  platforms
• Take the help of analytics experts to integrate
  and customize the code of analytics, tags, and
  additional settings
• Enable eCommerce features in analytics if your
  website falls into that category and create
  conversion funnels, infuse tags, and eCommerce
  specific code into the web page source code with
  the help of experts
• Deployment
• Without proper deployment, you cannot publish
  your website on the Internet and run it
  successfully.

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• Keep site source code for easy files and folder
  management
• Compressed the source code and resources of a
  website for fast upload on cPanel or through FTP
  like other methods
• Keep cPanel organized for easy source code access
  and frequent modification
• Use the latest hosting tools and feature for the
  best deployment process of your website
• Costing
• After all, things to consider in website
  designing and development, you must focus on
  cost
• and the cost-efficiency of your website.
• Hire a website development company with high
  reputations and profound experiences
• Obtain project proposal and ballpark estimation
  prior to making a final decision
• Define types of engagement model like fixed cost
  project, part-time hiring, or hourly rates
  hiring model
• Take estimation of duration or timeline and total
  hours likely consumed by the project
• Check costs of maintenance and updates in advance
  and add into the total cost of the website for a
  given period
• Check the cost of support services and free
  service offerings
• Voice Search
• The Internet of Things has gained massive
  momentum for quite a time, and 2021 could be the
  year we could see exactly what can be done. Two
  areas, especially digital

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• assistances and smart speakers, could be
  responsible for voice search growth. According
  to statistics, there will be more than 8 billion
  digital voice assistances by the end of
• 2023, and there will be over 163 million smart
  speakers by the end of 2021. The growth in both
  these areas will affect how developers will
  create something useful to interact
• with users with search engines through speakers.
  This means that the developers and the marketers
  need to adopt these things they do.
• Optimize your content for position zero with a
  short introduction of 40-50 words, and use
  tables or bullet points where possible.
• Dont be afraid to strike a conversational tone
  in blog content and your product descriptions.
• Structure your keyword research around questions
  and answers, rather than on single keywords or
  key phrases.
• Mix up terminology to provide a more varied set
  of keywords and phrases,
• covering all the relevant (genuinely relevant!)
  ways of asking a question. Keep it natural.

34) Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

• The next year will be the year of Progressive web
  apps. PWAs are not new when it comes to your
  imagination, but their influence will continue to
  grow in 2021. PWAs provide many benefits that
  will increase their use. PWAs user experience is
  second to none, and the use of mobile devices is
  expected to increase as brands continue with this
  trend.
• PWAs enable websites to load faster and still
  work offline. They recreate the browsers
  application experience and make things easier for
  developers than creating native apps for each
  device.
• Invest in PWAs rather than building multiple
  applications
• Optimize mobile devices to revamp your desktop
  applications

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35) Cloud computing

• The development of remote work would not be
  possible without cloud computing, and this trend
  should continue until after 2021. According to
  Gartner, public cloud services are expected to
  grow from 242.7 billion in 2019 to 6 306.9
  billion by 2021. With the growth that SaaS
  companies have seen in 2020 and some of the top
  tech companies
• announcements that they will move to
  Remote-First, you can expect that companies will
  need new cloud computing to sustain progress.
• Plan a long-term digital strategy that weights on
  cloud computing
• Adopt a multi-cloud approach to build a private
  cloud infrastructure

Conclusion
There are tons of factors influencing website
success related to web design and web development
process. Therefore, the given list and hints/tips
may prove useful for the website owners and
website developers. Moreover, based on this
knowledge, you can select the right Website
Development Company for your web development
projects. Just test the knowledge and skills of
your web designers and web developers before
hiring them. Dont put your websites success at
risk check out what our web development team at
Perception System recommends, and start building
today with our free, fun, and easy to understand
website requirements checklist! Reference Link
https//www.perceptionsystem.com/blog/website-buil
ding-tips/