The GJU website development process and best practices

Abstract

This paper introduces a website development process comprised of six phases: requirements, content, design, development, launch, and maintenance. In this context, a website is considered the primary marketing channel for a university and has different characteristics than web-portals. In the content phase, a flat content structure with fielded content types has been defined to make the website content-rich and intuitive to navigate. In the design phase, reusable page templates and engaging UI components were proposed to improve website appearance, usability, and responsiveness. In the development phase, the development framework, technology stack, and development steps to build non-interactive websites have been suggested. Best practices to test, secure, and monitor the website before launching it were also covered in the launch phase. Hosting a website in-house requires addressing issues like quality assurance and system administration in the maintenance phase. Yet, the analytics reports and survey results showed that the suggested process enabled producing a high-quality website.