Development: Writing the Code

Once the design is finished and the content has been made, it’s time to develop the website. There are two parts of the development phase which you should know about: the front-end and the back-end. The front-end is concerned with how your visitors will interact with your website in the browser, and the back-end will be concerned with how your data is stored, manipulated, and delivered to the browser. Both are necessary for a good website because a great looking website that doesn’t let your visitors do anything is hardly useful; and a functional website that confuses users is just as useless. We ensure that all of our websites look great and function well.

Front-end: Mobile First & Browser Performance

Front-end development is concerned with how a visitor interacts with your website. Your visitors will visit your website not just on a computer, but on tablets and phones as well. We need to ensure that they can interact with your website, perform it’s calls to action, and achieve our goals across as many devices and technologies as possible.

Mobile First

Mobile first means that your website uses a “mobile-first” methodology to ensure that your website looks great and functions well on every device. You may have heard the term Responsive Design. A responsive design is one aspect of a good mobile-first methodology. Ultimately, mobile first is about optimizing your website so that visitors can easily find the information that they are looking for, or do the action they came to do, no matter what device they are using.

There are many differences between devices, and visitors interact with them in different ways. A notable and obvious example is that on a computer a visitor will use a mouse or keyboard, whereas on a phone or a tablet they will use a touch screen. Simple visitor-feedback such as what a link does when you hover over it changes depending what device the visitor is using. Our goal is ensure that a visitor has highest chance of conversion. And to do that we need to provide slightly different user-experiences on each device.

Performance

Believe it or not your website performance will directly affect how visitors use your website. If your website is slow or takes to long load, you will lose visitors, and that means you will lose out on conversions, and potential customers. An important part of the front-end development process is optimizing your website so that it loads as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Optimizations such caching, minifying responses, & compressing assets will lead to a faster site and a better user experience.

Back-end

On an abstract level, back-end development is concerned with storing, retrieving, and manipulating of data. The entire purpose of a back-end is to collect information from a visitor, and to respond to them when they request information that you want them to have. More practically, part of this data storing, retrieval, & manipulation is what allows for a visitor to request and receive a unique page for each URL. But the important take away is that your back-end is not simply a means for running your website, it is a means for using data collection and data storage to achieve your goals. The sky is the limit. Any information which is useful to you, to your business, we can collect, manipulate, & store for your benefit.

Databases & Data Persistence

Databases are the primary way you will store any useful information. There are a variety of database technologies available, each which have various benefits depending on the type of data you want to store. Good database design is about identifying important relationships within your data, and having the means to utilize those relationships to your benefit. Although database design can be complex, it is based on solid mathematical principles. We know that your data is valuable. So no matter what solution we design for you or your company, you can be sure that it will be stable and secure.