Alright, this post might be a bit weird for my blog, but trust me when I say this-it’s fine. This is just my way of thinking while developing, designing, and finally publishing websites and web projects.
So, step number 0 for me is research. Yes, for me this step is, most of the time, the most important for a lot of reasons. For example, I once created a demo project specifically for a job application, but unfortunately, that project-including all the screenshots and subdomain backups from back then-has since been lost to the sands of the internet. Still, it was a good example of how I approach new challenges and test ideas in a real-world context.
For this project, I had about three hours to choose a theme to use. After researching themes and features, I moved on to the phase where I look for similar projects to get ideas that I may or may not use in my own project.
After that, I get to step number 1-sketching on paper or in Photoshop/Illustrator, just to get some idea of what I want and how I want it. For this part, things can get really messy. I mean seriously. For example, with the project Nekretnina.hr, the sketches got so messy that I couldn’t even find some of the early ideas because I put the papers in the wrong bin. Even the digital copy was, to be honest, a crappy shot with my then-current device-a Huawei P9 Lite. Yeah, designing was a mess, but still, this is for me the most annoying part of design, especially when working as a solo designer and developer.
Now, projects can be moved from design to a working project in step number 2-local development. In this part, I can do a lot of things: testing the design, testing plugins and custom code, and finally, creating content that can be moved to the next step.
Step number 3 is staging development and testing on a real server. Most of the time, this is on the server where the project will eventually be hosted. The reason this is important is that it simplifies testing after all the previous steps. Plus, here I can tweak what’s needed, and later on, this staging setup is useful for testing updates on a real machine without the hassle of making issues that could crash the whole site (which happened a few times in my early days of development before I knew about staging servers and setups) on production.
And finally, step number 4 is migrating from staging to production, which means moving files, folders, and the database to a separate installation. Here I can fix any last problems that might be found, and that’s it.
Step 5 is to enjoy the work and use the staging version of the site to test future updates and try fixes for problems that may be found later on.
Note: This article was originally published in August 2019. It is republished here with the text proofread using Perplexity AI Pro in April 2025. The cover image is new, created using Canva AI, as the original was lost in the archives.