How I Create Websites: The Process of Web Development

Many people, especially beginners, think that developing a website is purely about coding, but it’s not like that. There a lot of other things that you need to do if you wanna create at least a decent website. The part when you actually make a website with code or with WordPress or some other CMS is just a small part.

It’s relatively easy to create a website when you know exactly how it’s gonna look and work. For me, the most difficult part is actually coming up with ideas on how the website is going to look and all of its functionalities. So, it this article I am going to show you how does the process of creating a website look for me.

The first part is getting as much information as you can on what the website is going to do. If you are building a website for yourself, it’s gonna be relatively easy, but if you are building a website for someone else, you need to get as many details as you can, so that you know what you need to do.

In this first step, I usually write everything that I need to do and I also write in which order I need to do that. For writing, I just use the notepad, you can use anything that you want, it doesn’t really matter.

The second thing that I do is that I create a Sitemap. A sitemap is basically something that explains how things are connected and the relationship between them. That can be web pages, databases or anything else. For example, in the image below, we see all the parts of that website, where each page can and can’t leed you and brief functionalities that the page is going to have.

For creating Sitemaps, you can use any tool that you want. It can be Paint, Photoshop or anything else. I personally use Microsoft Word or lately, I’ve been using an online tool called Figma, which I’ll probably end up always using because it’s free and really simple.
3. Designing a Website

The third part and the part that most people associate with creating a website is the actual design. Designing a website before actually starting to create it is really important because it’s easier to design a website in some drag and drop software that in the code itself. That way you can easily change something if you don’t like or if the person for who you’re building a website doesn’t like.

For designing, I also use Figma, because of its simplicity and it’s free. You can use whatever you like, but the most important thing is that you like that software. When the design looks good to me or to the person for who I am building it, then I can start actually building a website with code.

Finally, we got to the part where we actually build a website. I build websites with code, but if you can use the same process to build a website with WordPress or some other CMS. Either way, this shouldn’t be the part where you do the design, but rather the part where you build the design that you did before.

In terms of the technologies that I use, I use HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some Bootstrap to build the front-end, sometimes I also use jQuery. For the back-end, I use Python with the Flask framework. And for the database, I use SQLAlchemy. Here are some courses which I’ve personally used to for learning:

The last part step is to test if all the features that you’ve built work, correct problems that are not corrected and when you know that you have a fully functional website without any errors, you can launch it live for people to see it. To launch a website you’ll need a web hosting server and a domain name. There are many good places where you can get them, I personally use Bluehost for both.

As you can see, the process of creating a website has a lot more steps than just coding. When you bring all these steps together, you can create a beautiful website.

I hope that I have helped you with this article. If you liked this article, make sure to share it with your friends.