1. [   ] Review business and marketing goals that need to be achieved
   • Before planning and designing your website and connected platforms you need to ensure that your key business goals remain the critical focus.
   • The downfall of countless websites begins when business goals are ignored in favor of metric monitoring and over development of features.
   • Online business decisions require delicate attention to the organic and forced progression of online standards and practices driving the types of interactions businesses can build to drive business and marketing goals forward.
   • Before embarking on your website development ensure you have planned your business logic, consulted your team (designers, developers, marketers, admins, content creators), consider standards, accessibility, best practices, and regulatory restrictions.
2. [   ] Brief your developer on the marketing and design goals of the project
   
   • To enable your developer or development team to work effectively they need to fully understand the key goals of the design and marketing strategy.
   • Encourage your development team to voice concerns about implementing certain design elements or third party marketing tools.
   • Speaking through potential issues and solutions before any coding starts can quickly identify misinterpretations or miscommunications saving time/work for all parties.
   • Discuss implementation options ranging from using open source, internal, or third-party tools, frameworks, and platforms to compare alternatives.
3. [   ] Determine which tools, environments, version control, and frameworks will be evaluated for cost effectiveness and feature sets
   • The first step is to know what services and features your online platform will need to implement your business logic with limited friction during design, development, and content management.
   • If you are building a high volume website, media heavy website, user uploading or real time interactive you will need to be aware of the resources required to operate at scale.
   • If you are building a static site, portfolio, small blog, small shop, or landing pages then building an efficient lightweight platform will maximize limited resources and prepare you for future scaling.
   • Whether you are working with a single developer or a team require a version control system and ticketing to be in place. This can be accomplished with a private organizational GitHub and will help visualize the progression of development.
   • Set guidelines for resolution, file types, platforms, compatibility, and communication to smooth the workflow and iteration process.
4. [   ] Map business logic and processes to story boards and wireframes
   • Implementing your business logic into your web design and marketing efforts is where the magic happens.
   • Providing detailed notes on how every design element integrates with business processes throughout the user journey.
   • Starting as simple as a "paper prototype" then moving to an interactive prototype which simulates browsing, key actions, and user interaction.
   • Be sure to extrapolate business logic beyond the website to include integration with day to day processes, inventory, book keeping, order fulfillment, customer management, and development workflow.
5. [   ] Provide your developer with real or placeholder assets, content, data, and third party integrations
   • Every website will function differently and take advantage of different web technologies to deliver values in different ways to the end user.
   • During development being able to visualize the data structures required to implement inventory, content, and external sources of data to build effective storage and querying methods.
   • Depending on the services and providers your business relies on your backend may need to convert or parse data into a format more appropriate for the web.
   • Getting your developer involved when selecting marketing, inventory, and fulfillment options to evaluate APIs provided by those services to enhance or deeply integrate business logic.
6. [   ] Setup development and staging environments for testing and iteration
   • As development progresses  from a minimum viable product  with core functionality to a fully featured launch the website will need separate copies while testing and prototyping.
   • A development environment gives your team flexibility to develop in a safe environment where breaking changes or critical fixes can be debugged. Using Docker, Git, VMs, or cloud based development environments for example.
   • A staging environment is where your team will test your site functionality and audit the site performance under the same configurations and simulated conditions as the production site. Can be a subdomain but try to keep it on the same server with similar resources to mimic production server resources.
   • The production site is your live website version after moving from development and passing testing in the staging environment to deployment on the live server.
7. [   ] Review goals, revise specifications, and reorient the team often
   • Depending on your timeline it could be weeks or months since you first met with your team and decided on the marketing, design, business, and feature goals of your web project.
   • Specifications outlined early in the planning phases may be no longer relevant or as impactful as originally proposed once the user sitemap, wireframes, and mockups have been fully realized exposing flaws in original plans.
   • The online ecosystem changes quickly so regrouping at this point can help to inject critical insights from recent developments which could hinder the project financially or technically.
   • Reorienting the team at and after this point will help to ensure that the project comes together as a complete package rather than a series of parts semi-functioning and lacking synergy.
8. [   ] Create strong internal communication channels between teams
   • If your teams struggle to communicate your teams will begin to work increasingly inefficiently as the interdependent teams internal deadlines and external roadblocks hinder development or create major issues in the long run.
   • Creating internal communication procedures gives team leaders the tools to effectively communicate tasks and seek information from supporting external teams.
   • Preventing communication issues and promoting systems that allow interdependent teams to share resources and ideas will increase productivity and reduce future work caused by incomplete features.
   • This communication system can be as simple as email threads and video calls or as complex as ticketing systems and intranet information systems
9. [   ] Balance creative freedoms and restraints to keep everyone sane
   • Communicating with your developer(s) while they begin their creative process is critical to getting the best quality work of your development team.
   • Explaining expectations at different stages of iteration can save time and stress as concepts are not over-developed during discovery or under-realized during finalization.
   • Clearly defining areas that should or should not be explored  can help to guide the development process as features are built, tested, and deployed.
   • Developers rely on the business to articulate and document their specifications clearly in order for the development team to deliver a high quality functional platform.
   • Be realistic with expectations and open to suggestions that will improve workflow, communication, and teamwork as the development team contacts and interacts with multiple departments to narrow specifications.