6 Steps To Ensure Effective Web Application Development

Web applications have become a necessary tool for businesses today. A web application not only increases the cost efficiency but also boosts the profitability of a business. A web application development team typically includes designer, front end developer, back end developer, and testers. An effective web app development process includes various designing, coding, scripting, and programming steps, which are performed based on the final strategy and planning.

Here are six essential steps to ensure a successful web application development:

Envision a Roadmap

This is the most important step as it establishes the goals and purposes of the web application. It gives a proper direction to the project and helps you focus on setting and achieving your goals. The roadmap should aim to solve a specific problem or perform a particular set of functions for users.

Define the Characteristics of the Application

This step involves identifying the characteristics of your web application. A proper analytics report has to be prepared to cover your target audience, data, and security levels. Consider the following points to create your report:

Type of audience: Statistics about the percentage of elementary, average, and advanced users along with their age and gender.

Web access capabilities: An access report that specifies the targeted audience’s access to the internet, intranet, and single & multi-level extranet.

Level of security: A report that specifies the security level to be integrated into the application based on the data, its vulnerability, and risk levels.

Choose the Right Technology Stack

The technology stack includes a set of frameworks, languages, and database management system to power your web app. The stack should be ideally based on the availability of developers, suitability of the language and the requirements of the application itself.

Here are some common languages and frameworks that help in design and development:

• Front-end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, VBScript, Ajax
• Back-end: Django(Python), Codeigniter(PHP), React.js (JavaScript), Ruby on Rails (Ruby), JSP,C++, ASP.NET
• Server: Apache, Nginx
• Database: SQL, MySQL, MongoDB(NoSQL Database), PostgreSQL, Oracle

Once you decide what you need to build, the architecture can be selected according to the requisites.

Create a Basic Design and Wireframing

A successful web application is all about ensuring good interactivity, interface, and user-friendliness and providing the best user experience. To achieve that, start the planning process by creating the visual guide, wireframing or simply sketching out the user interface and interactions. This basic layout plan gives an idea of how the application would appear.

Initiate Web Application Development

Once you chalk out the complete web app plan, it is time to transform it into an actionable plan. It is time to put the developer team together and create the web application architecture, framework, design its database structure, develop or customize the module, classes, and libraries, and finally implement all the functionalities.

User-acceptance Testing

The final step in the web app development process is QA testing and bug fixing. The application is put through the paces and all suitable testing techniques including load testing, performance testing, and usability testing.  Testers use various tools like WebLoad, Apache JMeter, Wapt, Qtest, and Selenium to test the final version of the app.

Web application development is becoming more popular among businesses to enhance user experience and bring efficiency to their processes. The procedure may look complex initially, but if the above steps are followed diligently, the process can be made simple and effective. Moreover, it requires an adept understanding of the evolving tools and applications to reach your desired goals easily.