The truth is that lot of people have ideas for applications but don’t really understand how to make them come to life. There is a general streamline process that you need to follow when developing a web app in order to make sure that you don’t miss anything crucial, and to help eliminate bugs from your app. The three basic stages are planning, designing, developing, testing, and deployment.

Before you can begin coding your app, you obviously need an idea and a sense of how your app will work and what purpose it will serve. You can use storyboards to help mock up the app and lay out the different screens that users might go through, and how the app will function. After you get the basic layout down, then you can move to a program like Photoshop and get begin to actually set things up. This means coding the HTML and the CSS for the app as well as any other design and text elements.

Once you have all of the preliminary design and layout elements coded, you need to move into adding the actually backend of the app and the user interaction features. This includes AJAX functionality, and other list interaction features.

After all of the coding is done, and you’ve got a basic app to work with, you’ll need to go through extensive testing before you deploy the app. You need to remember that if you don’t thoroughly test the app, you may end up with it being buggy, and there’s nothing more that discourages users than an app that doesn’t function well. Any time that you spend in error testing is well spent, and it will save you problems down the road and help to ensure that you don’t lose customers, visitors, or interest in your app.

Deploying your app is the final step in web application development, and it’s often the most fun. It’s the time where you get to showcase all of your hard work, and see how people react to what you’ve created. In this phase, it’s important to make sure you stay on top of the technical support requests, and are available (or have dedicated  a staff) to solve problems that arise. The truth is that no matter how much bug testing you’ve done, you will never know all of the potential problems with a web application until it gets into the hands of actual users.

Hopefully this gives you a good idea of what’s involved in the process of web application development. There are lot of great resources online where you can learn more about the coding process from start to finish. In the next post, we’re going to get into the idea of web application monitoring and why it’s important to keep tabs on the apps that you’ve created. Stay tuned!