Web Development Top 10 Tips
I have been developing website's for 6 years (see my About Me page for more info.). During this time I have picked up a lot of hints and tips and practices (good and bad!), this website has grown organically over the last four years and does not represent the application of these tips!
Hopefully you may find some of these tips helpful, below are my current top 10 tips for small scale web development.
- Uncover WHY you are building the website, what are the real goals? keep enquiring until you have them all.
- For any commercial project prepare a short brief, outline what the customer wants (their goals) and what you will deliver, be realistic with outcomes and dates, then both sign and date this brief.
- Agree the Domain name(s) early and purchase them early in the development.
- Use standards based technologies, plan your hosting arrangements very early - this may decide what technologies you can use to develop in, test the hosting package and your development languages early. Use familiar technologies whenever possible.
- Build for Accessibility from the outset, resizable fonts, clear layout, good contrast, content should drive the design.
- Build in Usability from the outset, pre-plan the navigation and the placement of major link, search and content regions
- Agree the design to fit within the usability and accessibility requirements you have already established, you will almost certainly need to compromise between the customer, the end user and your own views to come up with a product that fulfills the brief and achieves the goals.
- Content, content, content! To be successful the website will need plenty of high quality launch content. Whereas - good quality updated, accurate and fresh content is the recipe for long term success.
- Build a folder of consistent images (size and style) for use throughout the site, use 'alt' tags.
- Launch the site gradually, consider web stats and how you can use these to improve the site, keep the customer informed with visitor progress. Revisit the site as agreed in the brief. Sign off the project with the customer.
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