Challenges You Face During Web Development and How Can You Overcome Them

• Updated on: 2021-06-25
• Read original article here

So much has changed, such as new ways of hiring your team, finding employees, reaching new customers, and a new way for them to reach you.

Today, technology is evolving at breakneck speed; it is bringing new opportunities to web development companies. But along with unlimited perks and benefits, technology has brought many new challenges to individuals and businesses.

Therefore, if you are a business owner and want to create a lasting impression on your target audience, you must address such challenges.

In this cut-throat technology world, creating a user-friendly business website is not an easy task. You will face many issues and challenges while working on your dream project of creating an interactive website.

To help you achieve your objective, we have come up with the best ways of handling website development challenges. With the mentioned sure short ways, you can avoid various obstacles that arise during custom web application development.

Yes, this is the first thing that comes to your mind when you invest money in website development.

No one can give you a fixed price for your web development project. The estimated price is always a minimum, and in most cases, you end up paying more than what’s estimated.

One part of the problem is that you are confused with the design and technology of web development. The other is how much detail work is necessary before you declare that your project is finished.

You can tell if a budget is reasonable for what you’re trying to accomplish. If your budget is tight, you need to prioritize your features and ensure the critical ones are completed first before your budget is exhausted.

There is another solution to this; your budget could be saved with some homework or research; before you invest, you could go for cheaper markets like Southeast Asia, where the labor rates are much cheaper than the US or UK.

This will help you build the best website you have always wanted but within your budget.

This is another thing you might be doing wrong while initiating your website design. If you’ve hired a web development company in the past ten years at least once, you’ve probably learned that you need to be extremely specific and detailed about what you want in your website and how it has to look and operate.

Your project’s overall cost may change substantially based on seemingly minor requirements that end up making some existing platform a wrong choice.

You need to be more specific and detailed about what you want; you need to make your mind before starting the development process. Because once the projects start, and you think something else is better than the changes you want to make could cost you a lot over your budget.

Do you realize that requirements serve one purpose, right? They are a stake in the ground that one side can use to extract more work or cash from the other side.

You are halfway through your web development process and realize the requirements overlooked some critical features you needed or didn’t specify enough about the source data. All the work has been put to a halt as the developer needs to refocus and work on the contract to change the task orders and schedule.

You’re unhappy because you need to pay more for this, and also the delivery date is further postponed.

The web developer is also unhappy about having to stop what he’s doing. This will eventually put the entire development work in trouble and makes a business paying unexpected bills.

The best possible solution to this to have an explicit agreement about your contract with the web development company or the developer and what is being delivered.

There are innumerable variables, and many are not figured out until the project is started or well underway. The entire process needs proper groundwork to identify the possible loopholes. It is almost half of the work done for a project – and in most cases, that far more of an investment than the client wants to make without an actual result.

When your project is halfway through again, and realize that if you had chosen a different approach or solution, the result would work much better. This could happen on either your side or the web developer’s side.

But you’re far enough down the path of the current development to back up, and your original approach does fulfill the requirement. But you or the development team suggest it could give better results. What do you do in this situation? Would you go ahead or abort and implement the new solution?

Going back and redoing all the work to something new is wasting resources; it will drastically increase your budget and take much time to finish. You need to stick to the original plan and try to make it better, if possible.

Instead of having hard and fast requirements, you need to identify your goals and rank them by priority. You need to finish what you’ve started and use the remaining budget to modify that configuration towards the goals.

Once you have decided to build a new website, identified the requirements, found your web development company, and started the project, many things could happen. For example, the developer could be changed, and you have no idea why that happened. After a couple of weeks, you decide to call your new developer, and he’s done part of it – but had other clients asking for work, so they haven’t gotten to it yet.

A couple of months later, they’ve gotten close, and there is something to look at. However, it still needs a bit or much polishing, so the hard-core back and forth starts happening – and then the requirements document starts getting in the way.

Four months have passed by, and you have started to work on content. Another year has gone by, and there is a little push of effort till the site is launched. But nobody’s that happy about it.

Let me tell you what goes from the developer side. Any freelancer or development shop that’s any good is juggling many clients. With a stack of different requirements and an unknown length of time to implement, it isn’t easy to schedule out projects.

You need to know when the first one will be completed to proceed with the next one. It would be best if you kept hustling to get more work. Many projects take longer than you thought, and meanwhile, old customers are coming back with little changed they want to be done.

It can quickly become a time management nightmare. So how do you manage time?

Set up some constraints! You can start by deploying a fully-functional website, employing a few color changes and web pages. This is how you can make everything ready to show to the client to put in content in a matter of hours. It will be shorter all the time.

A site sitting on a development server hidden away from the public or the users is useless.

People come to the websites for the content, the interaction, or the user experience, to be precise. The good news is, the more often you update your site, the more reasons you give your visitors to come back, especially if you’re updating it based on their feedback.

Here, you don’t need to be in a hurry, patiently get your site out, and prepare a well-thought plan to update your traditional website.

After your site is launched, you realize it’s not perfect. You’re mostly happy with it, but there’s a couple of things you would want on your website, and you’re done with the contract with the developer or the web development company.

Even if you could get them to do more work for you, you don’t want to know they’re going to charge extra and try to earn some extra cost that they will swallow before the site gets launched.

And there’s a whole list of things you’d like to get done at some point in the future – but at this point, you need a break. Soon, your site starts collecting cobwebs.

Remember, you might see many spammers whose motive is only to harm the website with fake form submissions. As a result, your email form is collecting spam, and in turn, you have to restrict comments on your website because it’s getting spam. To get rid of these issues, you will approach a new developer, and go through the entire process again and most probably end up with similar results.

What do you do?

Make website launch as your first and the most prior task and not the last. As simple as that.

The launch of a new website is a significant milestone, to be honest. But you don’t get all your customers or site visitors on the first day of site launch.

No matter how meticulous you are, no matter how much time you’ve spent painting your shop, arranging your merchandise, and setting everything up, your opening day is just one day.

People would want to interact with your site every day. Most of them nowadays ask for login through social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, which helps them login in a second and leave comments or share something from your website.

Many businesses adopted this approach and observed that their clients keep coming back for help. They also found new ways of arranging their site and new ways of streamlining their ordering process, simplifying their fulfillment steps.

It seems that today, the Internet has become a nasty place. Many miscreants are looking to spread spam and viruses using your website and or hijacking your web host’s server to attack other sites and potentially intercept your customers’ credit card or personal information.

Any website can be hacked, and to prevent your website, you need to make sure the site is well developed, and all the security measures are up to date.

Most content management systems store all the content in a centralized database. Adopting a few generic web hosts can help you back the content up. You can still find a few that are best in keeping backups over time or effectively and selectively restore the items that might have been deleted earlier. And the vast majority of hosts still use FTP for file transfer—a too insecure protocol that was obsolete a decade ago. Meaning if your developer copies a single file with the help of an open wifi network, anyone can get the password and do harmful things to your site.

These are pretty easy problems to solve when you manage your servers.

Another issue nobody thinks about upfront—developers are continually writing new software to replace older versions. After every few intervals, they release various new versions—but make the mistake of not managing the older versions. This results in a less secure website or solution after two or three years. And you need to spend a few more thousand dollars on upgrading.

What should you do?

Ok, there’s a little secret about content management systems: They cost more. Your developer must have told you upfront that you won’t have to pay them to update content on your site by updating it yourself. In contrast, that is true somehow, as you can easily update the content on your own. In some cases, you have to pay the professionals to keep the program up-to-date. It may later cost more than developing a static site.

You might not get a CMS to save money. You’re doing it to get more business. Here, you don’t have to hire or wait for a professional developer to put up something special to bring customers as you can do it very easily on your own.

Suppose you’re investing some of your time and marketing resources to use your website effectively. In that case, you’re going to need help with the technical stuff—somebody has to do it.

They can be a tech-savvy employee—but they should be aware of every little update about security. They should also know if the update will affect the site? And what payments need to be done for the same? You might as well outsource these functions to a company that provides this maintenance for a bunch of other sites, which has streamlined the upgrade process, has decent backups, and the ability to roll back things that break and knows where actual attacks are happening.

Ok. It has been observed that upgrades are necessary to use a content management system, which sometimes costs a bit. This can be considered the most significant thing that comes in the way of website launch in the first place.

What do you do?

Perfection is expensive, not to mention impossible. While the developers or developing companies strive for nothing short of excellence, the simple fact is that the software they use is a collective effort of thousands of developers, and there are bugs.

These are often known that professional developers usually deploy an experimental module to achieve some particular goal, and an upgrade to a related module breaks it. In comparison, the developers have complete control over the change management process. They usually undo all the upgrades if they find something going wrong.

Here the goal is to minimize the impact of anything that goes wrong because we can’t prevent it altogether.

What to do when it costs too much upfront!

Find out the company and start working with the professionals who pillars a standard low-cost development configuration. You should also ask for an ongoing project support contract so you can make your project better in every way.

The simple fact is that web development projects are a nightmare because they’re all focused around a single, imaginary fixed point: the launch of a website.

Along with the mentioned ones, there are many other challenges in web design and development that website developers and website owners are bound to face.

Don’t worry, you don’t have command on all of these but yes, try to keep a close tab on a few important ones to make your website interactive and user-friendly.

Our answer is to get rid of all the stuff that makes it hard to develop a business website. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to start with a particular configuration’s primary site, and grow into it over time.

This will help you attain a consistent and highly-functional website.

If you have queries, you can raise them below in the comment box.