The modern market demand requires sturdy, thoroughly performing web solutions with a smooth UX, insignificant response time, and intuitive infrastructure. Otherwise, your website is more likely to put off potential users, rather than invite them for a long-term stay on your resource.
And as much as Drupal 9 provides excellent software powering opportunities and serves as a powerful website foundation, its powers alone are not enough to achieve a well-structured website that has everything a modern user needs without any excessive parts.
This is why it is crucial to carefully plan out the Drupal 9 website development cycle and take the process subsequently stage by stage.
The essential stages you need to work through include the following.
1. Discovery phase
The initial preliminary planning should be focused on project definition and requirements elicitation. This is where the big picture of the whole thing should be elaborated and the major project milestones defined. For this, a joint study across several aspects are usually carried out:
- Market research - study and analysis of relevant market trends and market-defining practices;
- Competitor research - study and analysis of the top solutions offered by your direct and indirect competitors.
These studies serve as great guidelines and inspirations for building a sturdy solution that is up to tackle the existing market demand.
2. Dev agency selection
You may as well have the best project plan ever, but it will rest obsolete without the savvy minds and hands that will help you bring it to life. Picking and hiring a reliable team of specialists is crucial, but it can be tricky with the overflowing market of IT services. Make sure to base your decision on the following points:
- Portfolio
- Official certificates
- Official partnerships
- Client testimonials
- Independent reviews
3. Design
With the formulated vision and settled project requirements in hand, you can start outlining the design of the future website. Create a sitemap that defines and structures the major elements of the resource. Go from big to small and expand the sitemap in accordance with features and capacities pinpointed in requirements. The most common structure of an eCommerce website, for instance, includes the following pages:
- Home page or main page
- Products/Services page;
- Sectioned product/service pages with descriptions
- Search and listing results page
- Shopping cart page
- Checkout page
- Testimonials/reviews page
- About and Contacts pages
Optionally, many eCommerce sites also have a Blog page, order history section, terms and conditions/privacy policy section, etc. The design stage is also where the visual patterns and color schemes of all web elements and sections are planned out and settled. The end UX rests heavily on the thoroughness of this stage.
4. Budget estimation
Calculating the budget is a very individual task - the final costs depend on a range of deciding factors, implemented elements and features, the complexity of efforts, etc. Your hired dev team should help you elaborate this based on their own employment rates, scope of complexity, tech stack, extra requirements, etc.
5. Support and maintenance
A professional team also always offers post-release support and maintenance services to keep the finished website smoothly performing in the field, with real user traffic spikes and whatnot. Make sure to settle this moment from the get-go.
At Alpha Web Group, we have seasoned Drupal specialists that help plan every step of the way and provide all-around website development services. Contact us to discuss the specifics and order a sturdy, profitable web project.