The Stages of Production

83 followers

7 years ago

Something that helped me when I first began website building, and is still helping me greatly now, is how I break down the stages of the process in my head. I went to school for my bachelors in Digital Cinematography, and one of the things I learned was the five stages of production. This is for creating a film of course, but the very same principle applies for building your own website.

Stage 1: Development - Where the idea of your site is born. You might choose niche ideas and start to narrow down within that scope, and navigate the direction you will want your website to go.

Stage 2: Pre-production - Planning, designing, and preparation take play in this stage. Scheduling for the amount of work you will need to put in daily, and perhaps budgeting for things such as software plugins and hosting for your site. This is where you take account for everything you will need for your site.

Stage 3: Production - Putting "pen to paper", or finger to keyboard. The actual work starts to happen of building your site. This is where you will continually add content to your site.

Stage 4: Post Production - In this stage, you proofread, revise, edit, take away or add to your content and website as you see fit. An important aspect to remember is perfection is in the eye of the beholder, and while assuring grammatical errors and presentation are good to go, some get stuck on the idea of over perfecting, which takes up time.

Stage 5: Distribution - Going live on the web! Getting your content ranked through search engines, promotion, and driving traffic to your site.

I have kept this break down in my head through the creation process for my sites. One of the most important golden rules that I learned is that the more time you spend on pre-production, and production, the higher quality of work you have to distribute to your audience in the end. Sometimes we all get stuck on just wanting to see the final product and getting it out there. Let's make sure that our final product is great because when it is, it attracts more attention, more viewers, and gains trust within your audience and community!

Thanks for reading,

Jerrell