800website is a Dubai web design and development agency. This is the process we actually run, with the honest note about which phase decides whether the project succeeds.
What are the phases of website development?
There are six: discovery, structure, design, build, testing and launch. Discovery defines what the site must achieve. Structure decides the pages and how they connect. Design settles the look. Build turns it into a working site. Testing catches what is broken. Launch puts it live and tells search engines it exists.
On a typical Dubai SME project, discovery and structure take two to three days, design three to five, build five to ten, testing two, and launch one. That is the 14-day Business build or the 21-day Premium build in practice.
The phases are not equal in length and they are certainly not equal in importance. Most people assume design is the critical phase because it is the visible one. It is not.
Which step in the website development process matters most?
Structure — deciding what pages exist and how they link to each other. It is the cheapest phase to get right and the most expensive to fix later, because every other phase inherits its decisions.
Here is why it dominates. Your page structure determines what you can rank for: one page called “Services” cannot rank for web design, SEO and branding simultaneously, no matter how well written it is. It determines whether search engines can reach your commercial pages at all — a page with no internal links pointing at it may never be crawled. And it determines whether a visitor finds what they came for in one click or three.
We have audited sites where the pricing page had never been crawled by Google, not because of anything technical, but because nothing linked to it. The fix was structural and took an afternoon. Two years of content had been published in the meantime, all of it downstream of a decision nobody revisited.
If you do one thing properly on your project, make it the sitemap — a list of every page and what links to it — agreed before any design work starts.
What should I prepare before the project starts?
Four things, and having them ready is the single biggest determinant of whether you hit the delivery date:
- Your content. Text for each page, or a decision to buy copywriting (AED 250 per page). Missing content is the number one cause of delay.
- Photography. Real photos of your work, team and premises. Stock imagery is visible and it costs you credibility.
- Brand assets. Logo in vector format, brand colours, fonts. If you do not have them, a logo and brand kit is AED 1,500.
- Access. Domain registrar login, existing hosting, any analytics accounts.
A project where content is ready on day one finishes on time. A project waiting on content finishes when the content arrives, which is usually weeks after everyone expected.
What happens after launch?
Launch is not the end of the technical work. In the first week the site should be submitted to Google Search Console, analytics verified as recording, and every form tested by actually submitting it — we have found sites where the contact form had never delivered a single enquiry and nobody knew.
Our packages include 30 days of post-launch support on Business and 90 days on Premium. After that, maintenance from AED 299 a month covers core, theme and plugin updates, backups and uptime monitoring. That exists because the most common way a WordPress site gets compromised is sitting unpatched for a year.
See how we build websites, the published packages, or what a website costs in Dubai.
Talk to us
800website is a Dubai web design and development agency with published fixed prices. Send the details and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price back — no hourly billing. Contact us, message us on WhatsApp, or call +971 58 578 5380.
