Building a website is like building a house. You need a decent foundation before you can ever move in, right? It is the same thing with a website. You can’t have a functional site without setting it up properly and making it look pleasing to your audience.
That also means that constructing a new website takes time. You cannot expect a website ordered today to be done tomorrow. There are two groups—web developers and web designers—working on your new site, and they need to work together to make sure your website is exactly what you need.
Let’s have a look at how long it takes to build a website:
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Step 1: Needs Assessment and Timeline Construction (1-2 Weeks)
The first step to building a new website starts with you—the person who needs the site constructed. Once you get together with the group, you will discuss what you want, who the target audience is, how you want the site to work, and many other things. You will also need to define a desired launch date.
Once the interview is complete, the web development team meets so the designers and developers can construct a plan for how they will meet your needs.
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Step 2: Web Design’s First Draft (1-3 Weeks)
Now, the fun part. The web designers begin to deliver a dozen mock-ups, or sketches of potential designs. You will be tasked with figuring out which one is the closest to what you want. Don’t worry, though. The design can always be changed later on.
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Step 3: Web Development Phase (4-8 Weeks)
This is the most crucial step. Once the design has been approved, the designers hand the project over to the back-end developers, who start adding coding to ensure the aesthetics are also functional.
Note that the web development phase is the longest section. This can take up to 50% of the project’s duration. During this time, developers and designers work together to fix inconsistencies and make the experience as seamless as possible.
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Step 4: Final Check and Approval (1-2 Weeks)
Go through the delivered product to ensure that it works and looks the way you want it to. Report any broken links or buttons or mistakes that you find so that it can be corrected before launch.
When you find nothing else to correct, you know that you are ready to go live!
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Conclusion
As you can see, many professional web development and design groups have a process that allows them to build a website based upon what you want and need. The timeline will change depending on your design, so the estimates can be different, but overall, typical website development and design takes around 2-4 weeks to build a basic site off a template and around 1-4 months for a total customized design.
