How to organize my website development for better live results?

Many website designers want to see their product live as soon as possible; regardless of the reason, it's always recommended to take an extra step or two before going live. Think about the following analogy: if you are going to a party or an event, you select the clothing and accessories you consider the best for you to wear for that occasion, and you might change them more than once until you think that what you selected is the best for you; that's the development environment in the website design world. At this stage of development, you write all the code and focus on features to add to your site.

After choosing all your clothes and accessories and laying them out on your bed, you start trying everything on, checking the mirror repeatedly before heading out. You might tweak or swap pieces several times until you’re fully satisfied with your look for the occasion. Without realizing it, you were essentially working in a staging environment, an environment where you can create, adjust, and fix things before making your big debut in the live world.

Congratulations! You’ve arrived at the event, and you look fantastic. Your clothes and accessories suit the occasion, and you’re wearing them flawlessly. This is the production environment: the final, refined version presented to the public. The people you interact with at the event will never know about the mess you left behind in your room or how many times you swapped and adjusted pieces in your staging environment to perfect your look.

Website development environments are workspaces with defined tasks and different levels of accessibility. Each environment is unique, and they are part of the timeline for a successful project. It is always best practice to complete tasks in one environment before promoting the project to the next environment, and never skip environments. 

It is quite normal for a project to be in different environments simultaneously when the team works on different project areas. An example of this can be the addition of an area that wasn’t considered when the project first started, and due to the evolution of the project, you now have to add it, probably another category of products or a new service that you now provide. 

Benefits of having multiple environments

It is always recommended to have an order in projects to run as smoothly as possible. The order in these environments has been demonstrated to help you produce a better final product. 

In the Development environment, you'll concentrate your efforts on all coding-related items, search for functionality implementation, and be creative. This is the main playground for your project, and that’s the main benefit of this environment; here, you should modify colors, font sizes, layouts, media, functionality, etc., and be sure to have it as stable as possible before passing the baton to the Staging environment. We all know that occasionally a bug can jump into our process, and that’s understandable. If you build a stable product in your Development environment, you may promote it to the Staging environment. This environment can be considered a live site with very restricted access. The benefit of this stage is that you can fine-tune your development and have it ready to go live. 

Yes, you read it well: “fine-tune.” I used this term because this is the last chance you’ll have to keep all the parts of your website in mint condition after extensive quality assurance work in all of its extensions, functionality, look and feel, double-check the responsive layout, typos, etc. 

As mentioned in the ISTQB foundations of software testing certification, The absence of errors is a fallacy, and nothing is closer to the truth than this testing principle. Some people expect to have an error-free live site, and that  will never happen, but if you are thorough enough in your testing, you will get a top-of-the-line website 

If you take care of all the tasks from the previous two environments, your production environment will benefit significantly. This is the face of your project to the general public, where you’ll find the most intense critics, your users. If something is not behaving or displaying as expected by them. A broken form, slow-loading pages, and links that don’t work, just to mention some cases, can hurt your project in a very detrimental way. 

The benefit of the production environment relies on having it in the best possible condition. A good user experience will always be rewarded with more visits, and that’s what we want, right?