A few months back I sent a friend of mine, Peter, was looking for a book about building websites. So I sent him my copy of HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible by Bryan Pfaffenberger et al.
I didn’t really use it very often, relying now on the O’Reilly definitive guides for XHTML and CSS. But there was one chapter, towards the end of the book, that I did find useful, particularly in the early days. That chapter outlined the Web development process.
- Defining your goals
- Defining your audience
- Developing competitive and market analysis
- Creating a requirements analysis
- Designing your site’s structure
- Specifying content
- Choosing a design theme
- Constructing the site (coding)
- Marketing the site
Notice how much planning is involved, and how far down the list actual coding is.