So you have decided that you want to take the next step and get your product or service online and out there for the world to sign up and enjoy. It should be a really simple process right? Get a couple of bids from your local web development talent pool, pick the cheapest one and 2 months later you retire and make money hand over fist while you’re sleeping. It’s that easy right? Wrong.

Interestingly enough we find that 3 projects out of 10 that we do, we were originally passed over for a cheaper company and when said company dove in and realized how difficult it is to truly produce a web development project that looks good from a web design perspective, functions well from a web development perspective, is integrated with social and mobile apps, and is secure, well, they quit. A month or two later Thrive gets a call from the customer that goes something like this, “Hey, remember me?” Just like that, we are on the job and down the road making your web development project come to life.

Why is it that web development is not as easy as just picking the cheapest web developer, snapping your fingers and making the project appear? We will attempt to take you to the ten-thousand foot view of a project and then hopefully you will begin to understand why picking your web developer isn’t [or shouldn’t] be an afterthought or the result of a low-ball bidding war.

I am amazed that time and time again, either our competition does not have a project manager or if they do they are only a PM in name and not function. It is crucial to ask companies that you are interviewing what methodology they use to manage their projects in and if their project manager is certified as a project manager? What certification do they hold? Why is this important? It’s important because a typical certified PM will have six-thousand to seventy-five hundred project management hours and have passed a stringent test to make sure that they know the procedures to ensure that your project comes in on time, in scope and in budget. Make sense? Bottom line, you need a qualified project manager to make sure you don’t get taken advantage of.

Below are just a few of the things our project manager does on a web development project to make sure your dollar goes the distance!

• Initiating: We review the project charter and initial scope statement if there is one. If you haven’t put down anything on paper detailing the project and what you want to accomplish, we will provide you with a template and questionnaire to help you get going.
• Planning: In this phase we take the scope statement from above and put in the hours to define the scope further and make sure we understand what it is you want to accomplish. Often times this step is the most important in the project management process as it creates the framework of the what will be produced. You can never have too much definition here as it protects you as a client from getting an inferior product and protects us as developers from having the scope change or expand beyond what was paid for.
• Executing: The project is speeding along now and production is done in this phase of the project. We will acquire any additional resources if they are needed. Additionally, we will break down the project into code sprints to produce the modules that will make up the final product or service. Finally, a work schedule will be created for all of the resources on the web development project taking into account lead and lag times and the expected delivery date to make sure that the project comes in on time.
• Monitoring / Controlling: Another extremely important phase of the web development project that insures that what is being produced actually matches the scope statement governing the project. In addition this process is crucial in identifying threats to the web development project being a success when it is deployed. In this phase the project manager works with project resources to perform quality checks on both the user experience as well as the functionality of the web application. Any anomalies found will be communicated back to the you as the stakeholder for review and action. This phase could possibly alter the scope statement and require change orders. These change orders could affect one or all of the scope, budget and delivery date. It might seem a bit daunting to think there is actually a project phase built in that may alter any of those things but think of the alternative: Paying for a project that is unusable because no one took the time to audit the product to make sure it well thought out and usable. In the end this phase makes sure that your effort and budget was well spent.
• Closing: The final step of the phase and project. We do some very important work in this final step. Documentation is developed that is necessary for the administrator or end user to understand how to use the product or service developed. A Knowledge Base is created and updated at the end of the phase and project to document the successes and challenges encountered along the way to speed future development or troubleshooting on the project. Lastly, all documents are prepared and released so that all parties have everything necessary to document the projects close.

Great UX Design is a crucial element in the web development process

Unfortunately great web developers typically are not great web designers. I say that at the risk of offending the web developers on our own staff and being pelted with office toys but it’s true! Seriously, do you really want the person framing your walls also doing your interior design? Of course not! That is one of the great things about web development at Thrive. We have been doing this long enough that the ego has melted away. We are completely [ok, mostly] honest with ourselves about who is great at web development and who is great at web design. I’ll give you a hint: The guys in flip-flops drinking Dr. Pepper all day are developers and the people in pretty clothes with stylish glasses listening to NPR... designers. See if you can pick them out the next time you are in!

Web development is both the goal and a phase of the web development project.

There is so much to consider in the development phase of the project. Now we are to the nuts and bolts of how the project functions. What it does. This phase is critical, it is where most projects break down because there are so few qualified developers that exist who can turn your web development project into a reality.

Here is what we consider when attacking the development phase:

• Client side: What elements within the design do we want the client to interact with, without a page load?
• Server side: What languages or systems will be used on the server to drive the functionality of the product or service that you are providing your customer. Is the language popular (can you find someone else to work on the project in the future if you needed to)
• Database management: Making sure the database is normalized
• Integration:Social media- Integrate your app into the most common social media sites. Mobile- Build a mobile app or mobile style sheet depending on what your objectives are

Your web development project is drawing to a close and the launch date is approaching. A testing phase has to be done to insure everything is ready for the client rush.

This is where the rubber meets the road. We often see that this is another phase of the web development process that most web developers skimp on or skip all together. Don’t let that happen! You can’t afford to invest months of time and your hard earned cash into a project just to have it go bust and scare all of your perspective users away because the first time they log in they are staring at a long string of error messages!  Thrive will work with you to either come up with a team of testers that you provide or we will provide testers who will load test your application to make sure every function is working the way that it should.

The site is done and it is time to deploy your finished web application.

Thrive will take care of all of the ugly stuff that you don't know [or don't care] to do.  When we deploy your application we put you on either a shared hosting environment or if we are anticipating a lot of traffic we will put you on a cloud server.  Once your hosting is set up we will install your security certificate, get your merchant account set up and repoint your DNS to make your domain name poin to your finished project!  Voila!  Simple.

The worst thing that could happen would be once your web development project is done, a lightning strike happens and your application is just gone.

Seems unlikely, huh?  Too bad all too often web developers you will be interviewing have no disaster recovery plan.  I mean none. Thrive has developed a superior disaster recovery plan. We have triple redundancy meaning your web application is being backed up in at least 3 geographic locations nightly. Anything short of a nuclear holocaust is covered.