Rapid Website Development: How to Design and Develop a New Website in Under 2 Weeks

Making a success of a new website can be a tricky thing to achieve. There are so many considerations from design and content, to technical concerns like mobile optimisation, performance, and SEO.

Too often, brands get lost in the process of web design and development, with deadlines missed or ever changing project scope.

However, achieving not just an MVP, but a production-ready website in 14 days is not just a possibility, but a viable option for any agile business looking to achieve results in a measured and lean fashion.

Building a website in under 14 days requires the perfect collaboration between an agency and client.

As an individual or brand, it's crucial to find an agency that understands your vision and has experience with rapid website development. Look for agencies that have successfully delivered projects on tight timelines before.

Your own role is equally important. Be ready to provide clear objectives, timely feedback, and be available for regular communication throughout the process. A strong partnership between agency and client is key to meeting an aggressive timeline.

To ensure efficient progress during the website design and development process, it's essential to embrace a collaborative approach.

You should establish open lines of communication between all stakeholders involved – designers, developers, content creators – to encourage frequent feedback loops.

It's essential to hold regular meetings where everyone can share their ideas, address challenges together, and make informed decisions collectively. This collaborative approach fosters creativity and accelerates the design and development process.

Top Tip: Having meetings 2-3 times each week over the 2 week deadline is a sure-fire way to make sure every stays on track.

Having well-defined brand guidelines plays a significant role in expediting website development. Before starting any design work, ensure you have clear brand guidelines that outline your brand's visual identity (logo usage, colour palette), typography preferences, imagery style guide, tone of voice etc.

These guidelines serve as the guardrails for designers and developers, ensuring consistency throughout the website. You may even identify from early on any issues with applying any guidelines in a web-safe way.

By having a solid brand foundation, you can streamline the design process and save valuable time during development. Each day counts when it comes to rapid web development so make them count!

Top Tip: Get your agency/web designer to test your fonts/colour palettes on a trial page from very early in the process. You'll be able to see if this translates as well on a web browser as you anticipate - or course correct if needed.

Choosing the right web framework is crucial for rapid website development. Most competent frameworks will allow you to choose UI components at pace and at scale whilst giving you space to customise and apply your brand.

A shameless plug, but Sites Done Right is an exceptional option that provides a user-friendly interface, helpful starter templates for every form of content and customisable components to make it your own. In addition this framework, it is accompanied by a SaaS-driven CMS, so you'll be able to update or create new pages on the fly without any coding skills.

With Sites Done Right as your web framework, you can significantly speed up the development process while maintaining high-quality standards.

What's a web framework? Web design frameworks can save designers and developers time and effort by eliminating the need to build every UI component from scratch. They also promote design consistency and help create user interfaces that are visually appealing, responsive, and user-friendly.

One of the key factors in achieving rapid website development is seamless coordination between design and development teams. By breaking down silos and fostering collaboration, you can remove  bottlenecks and reduce rework (which ultimately takes time and see costs soar).

Start by involving developers early in the design process. This ensures that designers create designs that are technically feasible and align with development capabilities. Regular sync-up meetings between designers and developers and even content creators can help address any challenges promptly, resulting in faster iterations.

Top Tip: You can get closer to the finished product/website earlier by tackling consistent components (rather than just page by page). For example getting the design and build of components like lists, tabs and accordions out of the way means they can be used across multiple pages at will.

Content creation often poses a significant challenge when developing websites on tight timelines. However, leveraging AI frameworks can help expedite this process.

AI-powered tools like Bard, Claude and ChatGPT can generate content ideas based on specific keywords or topics. They assist in writing compelling copy for things like landing pages, product descriptions and blog articles, saving considerable time for content creators.

Additionally, AI tools enable automated proofreading and grammar checks to ensure error-free content delivery within shorter timeframes.

How do you feel about our actionable suggestions on speedy web design and development. Do you use any of the processes mentioned in your own workflow?

Some key takeaways for your to remember are:

• Find an agency or design/development partner who aligns with your brand, vision and goals
• Come to the table with great ideas of your brand identity and guidelines
• Choose a framework that will allow you to work on design and development simultaneously
• Leverage the power of AI to boost your content creation process

If you're searching for a toolkit to help you automate and achieve rapid web design and development, why not take Sites Done Right for a spin? Best of all, it's free with no credit card required!