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Web Developers
Web development is an essential process for any business with a website, or looking to create one. Unfortunately, it is a process that is not widely understood, meaning that many website owners or managers fail to consider it fully as part of their planning and web build process.
If you are interested in budgeting, then our website development costs page may be useful; if you want more information about what web development is then keep reading. Otherwise, if you would like to compare quotes from top UK web developers, just fill in the form at the top of this page.
What is Web Development
Just about every business needs a website these days. It’s a relatively cheap way to get yourself in front of more customers and show the whole world what you have to offer. With all of the tools out there that allow you to create sites by simply dragging and dropping content onto a page, it can be very tempting to skip going through a professional web developer and try to make it yourself.
For very simple websites, this can sometimes work. If, however, you need anything more complicated, such as social network integration, dynamic content, or payments – basically anything outside of basic presentation and hyperlinks – you’re going to need to find yourself a professional website developer. They’ll be able to use more complicated web technologies and write custom code to make sure your website suits your – and, more importantly, your customers’ – needs.
Hiring a website development company can be a scary prospect, especially if you’re not familiar with all the web jargon that web-savvy types use. You may have an idea of what you want from your website, but little or no idea of how to express that to a developer in more technological terms.
Don’t worry though – we’re here to help! This guide will walk you through the process of web development, giving you an understanding of how everything works, how to ensure you find the right company to fulfil your needs, and the best practices to employ in order to make sure your customers get the best experience possible.
What can Website Developers Do?
What can Website Developers Do?
Customers now have incredibly high expectations of what a website should be, how it should look, and what it should allow them to do. They want it to look great on all their devices, look attractive, and generally be really nice to use. As such, basic HTML and CSS just won’t cut it for the majority of websites today.
Even websites that don’t have any complex functions or interactivity can benefit from more complex web technologies; a simple brochure page will be a lot more engaging to a user if it has subtle animations or parallax effects as they scroll.
A website developer will be able to help you realise a site that is perfect for your business by using a wide range of tools, including:
- server-side languages/frameworks
- client-side coding
- application development
- data storage and database management
- content management
- user accounts and social integration
- browser plugins
A developer’s main responsibility is for the functions of the site and ensuring you have a back-end system that is reliable, secure, and – if you’re going to be modifying any content yourself – easy to use.
If your website doesn’t function properly, your users are more likely to be driven into the arms of your competitors, so you want to make sure you hire someone who can get the job done right.
Traditionally, the role of the developer and the designer have been separate for the most part. Nowadays, however, it is not uncommon for a website developer to be multi-skilled; you may be able to find someone who will design your site, then go ahead and create it for you as well. The advantage of this is that your site will be created by someone who already knows the design inside out.
If you have a larger, more complex site – or if you want to ensure that someone will be able to carry out maintenance on your site for the foreseeable future – you might want to consider going through a website development agency. By doing so, you will be able to have one point of contact for just about everything, including:
- design
- graphics
- hosting
- database integration
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
A professional website development company will offer the same advantage as a multi-skilled developer; they’ll know your website inside out when it comes to creating it as they were also the ones who designed it. The difference is that a company will have more people working on your site so, in addition to getting it finished in a shorter space of time, your site is likely to go through departments that specialise in single areas, such as design, front-end web development, and back-end development. This will ensure that each aspect of your site will be created by people who specialise in that field and can do the best job possible.
As well as creating sites that are of incredibly high quality, professional web developers or web development agencies will be able to create a brand new website or web application from the ground up, ensuring that every part of it is tailored to your business and delivers everything your customers may need.
They can provide anything from social media integration, such as embedded Facebook comments and your company’s twitter feed, to an ecommerce facility that would allow you to sell your products online. Whatever you need, a professional website developer will be able to create it for you.
How to find a website developer
When looking for a professional web developer, a great first step to take is looking at existing websites. Check out the sites of your competitors, or businesses in the same field as you. If you see a site that you really like, see if you can find out more about who developed it. Their company information will often be somewhere in the footer of the site and you can continue your research from there. It’s also worth speaking to your professional connections or other business owners for personal recommendations. They’ll be able to give you a personal perspective on not only how pleased they are with their final product, but what it was like to work with that company.
When you think you’ve found some potential developers, it’s worth checking that a they’re going to be right for you by asking them questions such as:
- Will they be able to complete the job before the deadline?
- Will they be able to make the site run smoothly on slow internet connections and older browsers?
- Have they allowed extra time in case things don’t go as planned?
- Will they be able to make your website responsive and compatible with all screen sizes?
This last question is especially important: people now access the web on mobile devices more frequently than they do on desktop computers, so if your website doesn't work well on a phone you could potentially be putting off a lot of customers.
Professional Web Development Benefits
Professional Web Development Benefits
There are various benefits that come with hiring a professional website developer. Take a look at just two of them below.
Special Skills
The core components of just about any website are HTML and CSS, but web development goes far deeper than that. It’s no use having a pretty website if it’s slow to load and users can’t find their way around, not to mention how well it handles mobile devices and older browsers.
A professional web developer will use a wide range of tools and languages to ensure that your website is fast, accessible, and compatible, meaning your business makes the best impact possible.
Save Time
It takes a lot of time to run a business and you don’t want to be wasting that with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Not only will a professional web developer do the best job possible, they’ll be able to do it in a shorter time-frame thanks to their intimate understanding of how the web works.
Any web developer worth their salt will know exactly how to approach website development in the most efficient and effective way possible.
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Your Website Development Requirements
Your Website Development Requirements
Once you’ve decided you want a website, one of the first things to do is to work out exactly what you want from your site. You need to work out exactly what you want from the final website otherwise it may not end up properly serving your needs. If you’re working to a deadline, you may even wind up having last-minute and, as a result, poorly-implemented changes that will only drive your customers away. Different developers also have different areas of expertise, so you need to know exactly what you want in order to find the right developer or company.
Here are a few things to think about to help you work out exactly what your website requirements are:
- What is the target audience?
- What are people actually going to do on the site?
- How will they go about doing it?
- What other sites are my audience likely to be using?
- What do you need in terms of accessibility and usability?
- How much maintenance will be required after the site is built?
- Do you need to be able to modify content yourself?
A lot of these questions are customer-focused for a reason: your website is a portal through which existing/potential customers will be interacting with your business and possibly your services. A good site will keep your current customers with you and draw potential customers in. A bad one will only serve to drive them into the hands of your competitors.
To ensure your site is as good as possible for your customers, you should take a user-oriented approach. Think about what users will be doing on your site and ensure there are as few obstacles as possible in the way of them doing that. Figure out which elements of your site are completely essential, which are non-essential but will enhance the experience, and which can be disposed of altogether.
Your Web Development Brief
Once you’ve decided for yourself what you want from your site, it’s time to start working out how to tell that to other people. This is where the brief comes in. Your brief will be an outline of everything you need your site to do – it’s what you’ll send to developers to start getting quotes.
Begin your brief with an overview of your company. Describe who you are, what you do, and how you want to appear to your users. This should be done before you list any requirements – you decided on the features of your site with your company at the forefront of your mind; to explain it properly to someone else they need to have that contextual information, too.
Next, put together a list of concrete requirements. Explain clearly and concisely what features you want your site to have and, if you already have ideas, how you want them to be realised. Stress which features cannot be modified in any way and highlight anything that you’re not sure of which you may want advice on or specifics about how they would be implemented.
If you’ve got an idea of the layout of your site or roughly how you want certain elements to look, do some sketches. It doesn’t matter how bad they are, illustrations can often help developers understand what you want better than words alone. Get some screenshots of other sites that have influenced your decisions; context, again, can really help your developer get onto the same page as you.
This document will be crucial to finding the right developer and getting accurate quotes, which will be important when comparing them. It should be as in-depth as possible and not leave anything out whatsoever. Take your time to get it right and ensure you have everything in there; in the long term, getting this document right could end up saving you time and money by getting everyone on the same page at the same time.
Web Developer Technology
Web Developer Technology
Given that you’re getting a website made, it’s almost certain that you’re going to start encountering a lot of terminology and different web technologies. If you’ve got no experience with the technical side of the web, it can be quite overwhelming to hear technical jargon being bandied about, so we’re going to give you an outline of some of the most common web technologies/languages. Just remember, it’s not important that you know all of these in detail – that’s the developer’s job – this will just help you to understand what’s going on and make it easier to speak with developers.
First off, it’s worth explaining the differences between server-side technologies and client-side technologies. A server-side technology is exactly how it sounds – it’s something that is executed by the server. For example, if you were on a news website, when you navigate to a certain article, the server will decide what content you need to see and render out a page containing that content. None of this happens on the user’s computer; they just get the final outcome. A client-side script, however, is executed by the user’s browser. For example, when you click on an “Add to Basket” button and the number of items in the basket changes at the top of the screen. All of this is done by your browser; it means the page doesn’t have to be refreshed and there’s less waiting around to receive information from the server.
Some of the most common technologies used on the web are:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- SQL
- PHP
- Ruby
- ASP/.NET
HTML stands for “Hyper-Text Markup Language” and it’s a language that is at the very core of the web. When you request a web page, it will almost always deliver a HTML document, which your browser then reads and renders out on the screen. HTML’s primary concern is with the layout of content, but it also has some basic appearance parameters.
To change the appearance of items further, the most common technology is CSS, which stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”. CSS can define styles for different elements or objects, creating common appearance parameters as well as allowing for slightly more complex layouts. CSS3 is the latest version of CSS supported by all modern browsers and it allows for more specific controls over the appearance of elements such as:
- rounded corners
- shadows
- gradients
- web fonts
HTML and CSS can get you a great-looking site, but if you want to do anything a little more complex, such as animations, JavaScript is the next place to look. JavaScript should not be confused with Java – there are similarities but many of the core concepts differ – as the former works on all browsers straight out the box, whereas the latter requires a plugin. JavaScript can allow you to do some really great things, especially if you use the jQuery library. Here are just a few:
- opening a new window with control over size, position, and style (such as whether or not the tool bar should be visible)
- checking and validating form input
- changing elements such as images when the cursor moves over them (though now this can also be done with CSS3)
These three core technologies are all client-side. When you navigate to a site, you get the HTML and CSS files which define how the page is laid out and how it looks, as well as the JavaScript (either embedded in the HTML document or in a separate file), which the browser reads and uses to decide what to do when a button is pressed, a mouse hovers over an image, etc. On the server side, however, there are a few more technologies that are good to know.
SQL, or “Structured Query Language” is the most popular language for interacting with relational databases. It’s a recognised standard on the web, so if you use SQL you can be sure that it’ll always work in the same way. SQL has a very specific and limited purpose, which makes it incredibly powerful; it has a set of functions that it does and it does them well.
PHP stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor”. It’s one of the older languages for creating dynamic websites and as such can be a little slower than some more modern alternatives, but it’s still widely used in a lot of content management systems, such as Wordpress. A “.php” file is quite versatile; it can be made entirely of PHP, or you can have a mix of PHP and HTML, with it being possible to embed PHP in the middle of HTML code.
Active Server Pages (or ASPs) are a Microsoft-designed technology, though ASP on its own was essentially replaced in 2002 by ASP.NET. ASP.NET is a framework for web development, designed to be familiar to developers who have used Microsoft’s .NET programming framework, allowing them to utilise the framework through a wide range of languages. The ASP.NET framework contains a lot of ‘objects’ that correspond to functionality frequently used in the creation of dynamic websites. This can speed up development time massively, with the added benefit of the developer having a choice of languages to develop in.
Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented language created in the 1990s by Japanese developer Yukihiro Matsumoto – it’s widely regarded as being one of the most human-readable programming languages. Ruby on Rails (or Rails) is a framework for developing web applications using Ruby, similar to Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework. It also has a lot of pre-made objects frequently used in web development to help speed things up and emphasises using existing web technologies such as HTML and CSS as much as possible. Rails is what’s known as “opinionated”; if you want to make a site using Rails you have to do it “the Rails way”, following the best practices laid out by the framework. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it does mean there is more chance of consistency when working with different developers – just make sure whatever developer you end up working with is happy doing things “the Rails way”.
One of the newest technologies, Node.js, has also become one of the most popular. It uses the JavaScript language, meaning developers can use the same language for the front- and back-end of your website. There is a huge open source library of pre-made components that can be utilised and adapted and, because anyone can contribute, more and more of them are being added every day.
Get Quotes from Website Developers
If you want to find web developers to build you a brand new site or overhaul your existing one, Approved Index can find you a development agency perfectly suited to your needs. Simply fill out our form and receive a free, no-obligation quote from up to four professional web developers.
Just about every business in existence needs to have an online presence in the modern age, which is why you should get on this today. The quotes you receive from Approved Index will be completely free and, if you’re unhappy with them, you can just walk away straight after – there is absolutely no obligation. That said, we are confident we’ll be able to find you a professional web developer who will be able to get you exactly what you need.
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