Good web development is the key to success

First step: Project definition It is one of the most important points; the scope of the project must be as clear as possible, the requirements to be met from the start, what things you would like to appear later. The definition consists of many points, but mainly a study of the project must be done, describing the different sections and what is expected of each one. For this, it is necessary to make a series of mockups, or diagrams showing the basic operation and components of each section. This way, without needing to know how it will be designed, what images will appear, or the final colors, you can have a clear idea of the elements that each section of our website will contain. Second step: Design and layout The design of the website is as important as the development, since we define the appearance it will have, what our audience will see, the colors we decide will accompany our brand during its beginning. Once all parts are designed, a mockup is made. With this mockup we would have defined the markup code that the browser will read, with static information; all data placed now will be entered manually, it is test data, to see the design result with realistic elements. This part is what is usually called Frontend, all the code that makes the website look one way or another in the browser, that makes the user experience good or disastrous. Third Step: Development of the web logic Normally this third step is usually the longest of all, since it usually consists of writing a large amount of code so that the website is able to interact with the user by obtaining their input data, or showing them data that we have stored in some database. Defining this part correctly is fundamental for the good development process, as it will be the skeleton of our project, what keeps it standing; the more robust and at the same time lightweight it is, the better our website will work. It is very important in this step to use a programming language with which we feel comfortable and are capable of developing most of the functionalities required by our application. And it is fundamental, at least to carry out a project that can grow over time – is there any web project that doesn't grow? – to use a maintainable and scalable data and code structure. These words may be a bit scary at first, but they are almost always solved by using some Web Development Framework, as they help us organize the code correctly where we separate the data access logic from the way of showing that information to the user. A development framework also has many other advantages, such as a large number of functionalities that will help us save time (or, in other words, money) performing tasks in a simple way, protecting our website from a large number of attacks and security flaws that if we program everything by hand we will probably forget to check. Fourth step: Testing Testing our application, checking every detail, every point, data entry form, images, different browsers, options that may be unlikely but that will almost certainly occur – who in their right mind is going to choose the blabla option together with the whatever option? – testing the emails sent to the user, spelling mistakes… everything is important. Fifth step: Publication It is the crucial moment of our project, we are going to have the website available online, people will be able to see it and probably criticize it… To take this step, we have to be sure that we have done enough tests, that everything is in order and launch the website. Probably, no matter how many tests we do before publishing, problems will arise later. That is why it is common to first launch with a beta phase, where users gradually access the application, usually by invitation. This way we can use their reactions and comments to improve the website or change things before going public. Well, more or less this would be a correct web project development process, each of the steps can be broken down into many intermediate steps, which will be developed in upcoming articles. In addition, this approach is somewhat simple and is based above all on the iterative development process. Currently, the agile approach for web development is becoming very popular, which makes me happy, where the process is iterated upon, achieving different versions of the website, from a very basic one to the final one. In upcoming articles I will explain what these development methods consist of. Contact us!