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The Timeline For a New Website
By Steven | New Website
Possibly the most frequently asked question we get from potential clients, “How long does it take to create a new website”. Well, the short answer to that question is, it depends on several things.
Depends on what?
In this article, I’ll go over the four major factors that will determine how long it will take to produce your new website.
But, if you’re simply looking for a quick list, here it is:
A simple 10 page website should take about 4-6 weeks. This time frame includes a custom industry-relevant design, and security measures. If someone is telling you they can make a website for you in a week; then it’s not a custom design, and it’s not secure.
The largest bottleneck to the timing of a website launch is how quickly the content can be provided. This is usually the biggest hurdle because the content is provided by the client in most cases. And they are often too caught up in the day-to-day dealings of their business to spend the needed time organizing and preparing the content. This is a problem we are striving to address in our initial phone call, and questionnaire.
The size of the project also has a large effect on how quickly we will be able to finish your website. simply put, larger websites take longer than smaller ones. In general, the more pages a website has, the larger the project is and the longer it takes. The reason for this is because each additional page requires additional QA (quality assurance), Mobile Design, graphics, SEO tagging, etc…
Sheer size isn’t always more time consuming. For example, a 12-page website may take a long time to develop, if each one of those pages has a completely different design, and style from the next. Not only is a total number of pages important, but so is the total number of unique page designs. A unique page design has a different looking layout and design than any other page on the site. If you look at most websites, you’ll see that the homepage has a unique design, but often the inner pages all look at least similar. Websites that have each inner page look different are more complex and typically more expensive. They also take more time to design and develop which impacts how quickly the website can be completed.
The website’s design isn’t the only factor that matters when it comes to how quickly it takes to launch a new site. The functionality also plays a huge role. Functionality is basically anything that is dynamic. This can be things like filtering functions, such as project categories or portfolio items. It can also be any movement you see on the screen which is done via HTML5 or javascript and requires quite a bit of additional coding, and time.
Now that you have a better sense of what factors go into the timing of a website project, you may be asking yourself what you can do to ensure your website launches as quickly as possible.
When it comes to getting your website launched quickly one of the most important thing to focus on first is your sitemap. The sitemap is the architecture of all the pages of your website and how they relate to each other. Defining the sitemap, the number of pages, which of them will be uniquely designed and how they will all relate to one another will go a long way in properly defining the scope of your website project and ensuring that it is delivered promptly.