Matt,
Most people will just say design and code, but there's a lot more to it than that, I used to believe it was a lot of non-sense and over-the-top, but believe its not and best practices learnt now that will save you time and money in the future. You need to look into software engineering, this takes you through all the stages research, spec, analysis; use-case etc.., design, implementation, testing, documentation.
I would recommend for the theory:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...346405-4864442
Linear Mode
