Initial framework for website design and development

Abstract

Website development is becoming a growing concern for all organizations in this world. However the process and lifecycle involved in their development is still uncertain. The Web based system development usually involves more heterogeneous stakeholders as compared to traditional software’s development construction. The process models used for the development of websites stands borrowed from the traditional software development approaches. The process of website development involves several fields of web engineering and multimedia applications which require altogether a different skill set and development processes. The growth of web based system has been exponential. An estimated size of public web and deep web has reached to 40 billion pages and where the pages are assembled on the fly in response to the user requests touches between 400 and 750 billion pages, respectively. The web based system size is continuously expanding like the universe after the big bang. Many researchers and practitioners have noted the rapid growth of internet for commercial purposes since its birth in 1990’s. The web presence allows small companies to compete comparatively at par with large enterprises which increases keenness for every organization to develop a website. An increase in the amount of web development work, forces the designers/webmasters working in different website development houses to carry out work in a well planned and systematic manner. The concerned organizations and different web development houses must, however follow specific methodologies/standards/guidelines recommended by various organizations for advancement in present web development process models. The adoption of traditional methodologies of web development leads to the production of poorly designed web applications which show variable performance across different browsing platforms and have high probability failure rate. This propagates in the lack of confidence during web development and ultimately moves towards Web-Crisis. In order to avoid Web-Crises, there is a desperate need of designing and developing the newer process models that are especially concerned with website development. As such there is a need of disciplined approach towards the development of web-based systems. Researches also suggest that there is a non uniform approach in web based systems development. The authors suggest that a specialized model for web development needs to be designed and developed to satisfy the dynamic categories of the stakeholders present worldwide. This paper discussed about the various traditional software and web development models popularly used in developing web applications and their suitability and effectiveness is compared which leads to the development of a successful web based applications. Various reasons which differentiate the traditional software development from web system development have also been worked out. The presences of specific features recommended in proposed framework are also tested by available methodologies. Finally, an initial framework is proposed which caters to the need of specific web development process model.