Website Design and Development

Website "design" usually refers to the visual layout, graphics and navigational elements of a web page. Design may start with an outline of the content to be included and page mockups. Most web pages include areas for a header, a navigation menu, body content and a footer. Body content may be made up of one, two or three columns. The areas can be reshaped and sized depending on what will be emphasized. Design is more art than science.

Website "development" typically refers to the programming needed to support the design. Website development projects can be challenging software development projects due to the number of languages, security considerations, browsers and integration of external content and applications.

Considerations

• Templates/Frameworks

  While it is possible to program each web page individually, some type of template or framework is typically used for web development because it adds consistency and the ability to make changes across an entire website quickly. If the web developer is providing the framework, ask whether there is a licensing fee or whether it is yours to use and modify.

• Template/Framework Choice and Web Hosting

  Most web hosts will support PHP (a server programming language) and MySQL (a database). If the framework for your website uses a different server-based language like Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) or Sun's Java Server Pages (JSP), it may require a more specialized web host. The choice of database software may also require a specialized host.

• Search Engine Optimization

  Search engine optimization (SEO) is partially based on the structure and content of your web pages and must be a key development consideration.

• Development Components

  Shown below are some of the core technologies that may be involved in creating your website to give you some appreciation for what is involved and to scare you away from the idea of programming it all yourself unless you have web software development experience or you are using a WYSIWYG web page builder application.

  The current best practice in web page development is to use XHTML — an updated and stricter version of HTML — for page structure and cascading style sheets (CSS) for as much of the style and layout as possible. Use of XHTML and CSS can help ensure that web sites are consistent, separate content from styling and allow for fast changes across an entire website.

  • Web Page Structure: HTML, XHTML & XML
  • Web Page Styling: CSS
  • Web Page Graphics: JPG, PNG, GIF & Flash
  • Web Page Client/Browser Logic: Javascript & AJAX
  • Web Page Server Logic: PHP, ASP & Java
  • Web Page Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL & Microsoft SQL Server
• Integration

  Identify whether you will need to integrate with other applications or other content available on the Internet. For example, you may want to display a list of all the products you sell from your accounting application or embed a Google Map for your location.

• Updates to Web Pages

  Ensure that whatever approach you choose for web development allows you to easily make updates as needed.

• Dynamic Content

  A website with content that changes frequently can keep visitors coming back. Blogs, forums and visitor comments are examples features that can add dynamic content. Databases are used to store content.

• Customization

  Features outside a web framework can amount to custom software development. It is important to ask whether the web developer has experience doing what you need.

• Reporting and Analysis

  What type of reporting do you need to track related to the activities of website visitors? Detail tracking may need to be built into web pages. Web hosts can provide basic statistics like the most popular pages and the number of visitors per day.

Design & Development Options