Valeo Marketing

Web Development Tips – Part 2

/in /by
  • In a website development process, time means money and to complete a project on time you need to be  good at Project Management. The key is to spend considerable amount of time on creating functional documents of the project so that  later on there is no room left for confusion among team members in terms of resources, quality standards, time line and other project  requirements.
  • Before embarking upon a new online  venture, you may consider running a dummy site as a test blog to  measure how much demand does your product or service has. If it’s an  e-commerce website, you may try selling your products on a wordpress  blog that is attached to a payment  gateway. You will get several valuable business inputs from this blog that can be implemented on your actual website development  process, saving you both time and money.
  • You can use some really cool looking Javascipt and AJAX, for professional coding including interactive solutions for lightboxes,  form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. However, while working  with Javascrpt and especially AJAX, one must keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. Too much of  flashy Ajax can easily confuse your visitors by offering too much  control and too many features at the same time.
  • It is very important that the code of your website application not only executes well, but also reads well, so that when someone refers to it even after years of development, it must be a piece of cake for him. Not only does it save your time and money, but also helps testers and developers to find and fix bugs found during the regression tests.
  • If you are looking to embark upon an online venture, choosing a perfect domain name for your website  is the first step towards right direction. A domain name can surely make or break an online business. Ideally a domain should read good,  sound unique, should be brandable and have a nice memory recall.  Here is a good resource you may want to check to  select a dream domain name for your website.
  • Did you know Public Relations is an eternal part of Website Development process? How your website  communicates with the user decides the performance of your website.  It gets communicated in the form of error messages, help tool tips  while form fill up etc. This communicates how much does a website  owner values his users. If you need inspiration on PR, check out how twitter communicates with its users with explanatory error messages and cute  looking graphics. If you are good at PR, you can definitely expect more user loyalty for your website.
  • Many people tend to confuse XML to  a programming language but the truth is that you don’t have to be a  programmer to use it. XML makes it easy for a computer to generate  data, read data, and XML ensures that the data structure is  unambiguous. XML avoids common pitfalls in language design: it is  extensible, platform-independent, and it supports  internationalization and localization. XML is fully  Unicode-compliant. Here is what W3C has to say about XML.
  • There are free tool’s to monitor the  performance of your website in personalized AJAX dashboard interface. Monitor.us checks your website for server performance and availability, generates up-time and availability reports, tracks visitors, checks  system resources, and alerts its users in case abnormalities are detected.
  • Here are a few Dreamweaver tips to help you in web development:
    • All the pages in your website should have a common structure.
    • ‘Include files’ should have a common code.
    • Create rollover buttons/images in Dreamweaver.
    • Most of your PHP scripts will  probably do many of the same tasks, such as database functionality  (insert, update, select, delete), and have many of the same  functions. You could re-write these functions and tasks every time  you start a new project, but that seems a bit pointless. Instead,  you could use an existing framework or skeleton, and base your new  scripts on that. You can either use a full-blown PHP framework, like  CakePHP or the Seagull Framework, but you can also use a very simple skeleton that you create yourself.