What Are the Stages of Web Application Development?

The worldwide web application market is forecast to be more than $10 billion by 2027. If you’re thinking of developing a web app to grab a piece of that market, it’s important to follow some standard practices.

Let’s look at the 7 web application development stages.

1. Define the Product

Before you start planning and coding your web application, it’s important to know the scope of the project. Start by defining the product — what features you’ll include in version 1.0, the audience you want to reach, etc.

2. Discovery and Planning

Once you define the scope of your product, your app development team should start planning. This includes the development methodology — scrum, agile, lean, etc.

It’s important to have a solid plan in place before you start the design and coding process. This will inform how you deal with delays, conflicts, and other problems throughout the project.

3. Wireframe and Design

Next is the wireframe and design stage. Wireframes are rough diagrams of the various screens and user-facing elements of your app.

This stage creates a basic design framework that the developers and graphic designers can work within as the app’s development progresses.

4. App Development

The next step is what most people think of as app development — programmers coding the app. The language and software frameworks you’ll use at this stage should have been defined in the planning process.

That could mean coding the entire application from scratch or dropping existing libraries into your code, such as a C# PDF OCR engine or other pre-built tools.

5. Copywriting and Marketing Assets

The best app in the world won’t be successful without effective copywriting and marketing assets to back it up. This can take many forms, including:

• Text content (blog posts, marketing email, landing pages, etc.)
• Videos
• Audio content such as podcast ads

You can start working on these assets as soon as you’re finished the planning stage but expect to make changes later in the design process. Changes will inevitably happen in the app development stage.

6. Product Launch

Once the app is built, tested, and ready to release to the public, it’s time to launch your new product. Depending on the target audience, this could mean a simple information campaign to a select group of people or it could be a big PR campaign to reach as many people as possible.

7. Post-Launch Support

After the product launches, you’ll need to support its users. There will be inevitable bugs, no matter how thorough the testing process is, and you’ll hear from a lot of customers with questions and suggestions for additional features.

Don’t Skip Ahead in This Process

It’s important not to skip any of the steps in this web application development process. It’s tempting to jump straight to the coding and development stage but without laying a solid foundation first, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of problems.

Be sure to browse through the Tech section of our website for more helpful articles about app development.