Let’s Consider the Laravel Framework and How to Succeed With Your Project
According to recent surveys, nearly 45,000 businesses currently using Laravel for development projects. Laravel is the foundation for nearly 750,000 global website.
In this article, we will discuss some of the primary considerations you will need to include in your Laravel project plan. As with any software development project, you will want to assess your needs, the needs of the market and your customers before you choose a development environment and start working on your web application. This list will get you started.
‘Based on all of your requirements and the research you have done, you will put together a budget, a schedule, and the resources to develop your Laravel solution.’
Requirements
Your requirements must include your technology landscape, hardware, network, and support systems, as well as any integration of data sources. The more detailed your requirements for features and functionality, the more likely your Laravel consulting partner can meet your needs, without rework.
If you are struggling to decide how much to add to your web application in the way of features and functionality, you may wish to design a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with basic features that your test audience can leverage to give you feedback on what is mandatory to have, what is missing and how users might want to change navigation or features to meet their needs. If you need detailed information on the MVP process, please refer to our article ‘MVP Software Development: Everything You Need to Know (The What, Why and How).’
Target Audience
The ability to pinpoint your target audience will drive a lot of development decisions. You will need to know what types of devices they use (see the section below for further detail), and the target demographic, languages, what kinds of features they expect, how you will fill the gaps of competitive products to attract these customers, etc. Knowing your target audience will help you develop the product, the roadmap for future upgrades and the marketing and advertising messages.
Product Expectations
As you develop your product expectations, you will fold in the information you have from your technology requirements, your target audience, your initial set of features (perhaps culled from an MVP launch), and when and how you will upgrade. You will want to address the expected speed of development and launch, and manage your expectations accordingly. If you are creating a complex mobile application, your schedule and budget must be adjusted accordingly.
Devices, Web, Etc.
Your product plans must incorporate the type of devices, or a list of devices or access points you want for your mobile application. Will you design your Laravel product, app or solution to run on desktops, via the web, on tablets or on smart phones (or all of those)? All of these devices have different issues, resolution concerns, navigation considerations, screen sizes, and data access and integration concerns.
Budget, Schedule, Resources
Based on all of your requirements and the research you have done, you must now put together a budget, a schedule, and the resources to develop your Laravel solution. Because most businesses (big and small) want a cost-effective method to develop a customer product or an internal business user solution, you will want to seriously consider engaging an expert, skilled, IT consulting partner – one with the resources to provide Laravel skills and the extensive knowledge of PHP, of the market, development tools, the framework, and platforms, etc. While you can consider services like Laracasts for developers to educate and train a team, this process will take time and the resulting team will not be flexible to adapt to changes during the project if you add features or run into a snag. Once you have a budget and a schedule, you will want to stick to the timeline and mitigate additional expense. Engaging a skilled consulting partner will help you stay on track.
Engage an IT Consulting Partner
With the right IT consulting partner, you will have dedicated resources to work on your project and guide you to project completion, and through upgrades and maintenance, without the need for your business to hire, train and house a development team. You can engage a team that is dedicated to your project for a one-time project or for ongoing maintenance, support and upgrades. Laravel leverages PHP and integrates technologies including MySQL for database management, HTML5 to structure and present your content JQuery for the user interface and Angular to build the web app. Be sure that your prospective IT consulting partner has these skills and the numerous others required to address any and all of your requirements.
‘Assess your needs, the needs of the market and your customers before you choose a development environment and start working on your web application.’
This article provides a list of general considerations to help you get started on planning your Laravel development project and finding Laravel resources to help you complete that project. If you are interested in finding out how Laravel can help your business, you can get more information here: Find out whether Laravel Application Design and Development and the PHP development approach is the right choice for your team. Explore the benefits and components of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to product design with these complementary articles: ‘What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? and Why Should My Business Care?.’ Discover the benefits and components of mobile application development, and the Flutter development environment, with these complementary articles: ‘Mobile App Development is Important to Business, So Are Mobile App Programmers,’ ‘What are the Pros and Cons of Flutter Programming?.’
