KOTA Web Development process: How good websites are built

Introduction

At KOTA, we pride ourselves on building lightweight websites that feature a high level of finesse through subtle animations, keeping the user wanting to stay on the site longer, but without compromising on functionality and intuition.

Our in-house developers work side-by-side with the creative team. They find natural breakpoints within the content and prioritise functionality based on known statistics, whilst removing unnecessary assets as the site responds to a user’s device.

Find out how our award-winning websites are built below!

 

Our Web Design Process.

1. Design handover
After the client signs the design off, it’s time for the web development process.
In this phase, our designers and developers brainstorm together on how the design needs to work in the final product.

We need to establish how the website will work visually, as well as how to build the back-end so that it aligns with the client needs. Depending on all those requirements, we plan and explore the best way to build the website, including which tools to use. When this is done, we can move on to the development process of the website.

2. Back-End
99% of the time we start with the back-end of the website. Firstly, we create fields in the chosen CMS so that the client can start populating it with content straight away. We always make sure it’s as flexible as possible, so the changes can be made easily, and the content can keep on evolving.

In the back-end phase, it’s really all about fields available in the CMS and data handling for our developers. That’s 50% of the success – you don’t want to have a beautiful website which is a nightmare to update.

3. Front-End
After the CMS is set up properly and all the fields have been created, we start working on the front-end of the website. This part is all about the visual aspect of the website and the interactions with it.

At this point, we make sure our code is semantic and clean to make the most of it, in order to have the site ready for the SEO process. We develop each component and pages responsively with desktop and mobile designs as references. Now, it’s really all about HTML, CSS and Javascript coding combination to make the site as slick and smooth as possible.

4. Testing
After we’ve done with the development and are happy with how everything works, we still have a really important part to do: testing! It’s a crucial part of the development process.

At this stage we test, inspect, click, etc. We try to find any bugs or errors which could have occurred during the process.

Testing is really here to fix anything that needs fixing, as well as to future proof it and to make it work as expected from the design. We also do browser testing, since some browsers behave differently, so we need to make sure the website is resembling the design as closely as possible for every browser concerned. When the testing has been done and fixed by the developers on mobile, tablets and desktop we are ready to go live!

5. Go Live
Here we are, the website is there on the web! For now, it lives on a staging link, so we can see how it looks like. The client also needs to see the back-end before going live. When we have the final sign-off we can officially go live. Then the new server is set up and the domain details are linked to the correct endpoint.

That’s it – you’ve got a stunning website by KOTA on the world wide web!