Website Development

Build the perfect platform to drive profitable interactions between your product and the user

10 Insights You Need to Know About Website Development

Top-notch website development starts with attention to detail and persistence to improve. Whether you are looking to outsource website development for the first time or rework an existing project, there are well-established best practices you can follow to ensure your platform will be as good as possible. Following these practices can help reduce website development costs by optimising development time and help establish a website development requirements checklist for your business. Additionally, the following tips can help you establish what to look for in a website developer.

The Website Development Lifecycle is an Ongoing Process

If you go into website development expecting the process to involve hiring developers once, shipping a finished project, and never needing to work with developers again, you’re going to be very disappointed. Website development is not a “once and done” project: it’s an ongoing process. However, the good news is beyond the initial launch or redesign, the maintenance workload tends to get easier. Your business needs to maintain the site as long as it’s in use. Your website development expenses budget should include room for ongoing support and development to handle things like site optimisation, removing unnecessary content, fixing broken pages, keeping up with SEO algorithm changes, and fine-tuning the design to keep up with web design trends. The website development lifecycle is an endless race, but you don’t need to sprint the entire time.

Responsive Website Design Streamlines Development

In its simplest terms, responsive website design leverages programming techniques to adjust a singular website for all possible devices and screen sizes. Responsive website design exists in contrast to developing individual sites for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. The single site method helps bring down the average cost of website development because it streamlines workflow and reduces how much code website developers need to maintain. Being platform and screen-size agnostic means you can focus all your programming work on one site infrastructure. It’s easier to develop a single site that works for all devices than multiple sites that are “best guesses.” Additionally, having a single code base to work with makes it easier to hunt down code that needs to be changed.

Load Times are Important

While widespread broadband adoption has greatly improved the online experience for users, not all connections and devices are able to provide quick access to content with a large data footprint. In particular, mobile devices still have issues with loading content-heavy websites in a reasonable time which can lead potential customers to abandon your site while it’s loading. Remember, poor load times can be a problem on any device. One of the biggest challenges facing developers with load times concerns managing content from creators who fill a page with excessive amounts of content. If you’re looking at improving load times, start cutting unnecessary scripts, minimising how many data requests a page makes, optimising images for data-efficient display, minifying code where applicable, and cutting unnecessary widgets. Using “Lazyload” for images, in which the images do not load until they are displayed on the screen, will significantly reduce page data footprints even when content creators go overboard.

Develop SEO for People, not Machines

Relevant, quality content drives more clicks than any programming trick could ever hope to. Search engines are designed to emulate and follow human behavior when determining results page priority. Therefore, your role as a developer in SEO means making it easy for search engines to find and process content. Developers should make sure all pages that should be indexed are easily accessible through links. Do not invest in programming tricks to mislead search engine crawlers: instead, use straight-forward structure. The one thing search engines heavily utilise that people don’t is the sitemap, so it’s the developer’s job to make sure it works while Google, Bing, and Yahoo can find it. Also, pay attention to developing a canonical links algorithm for duplicate pages if your CMS doesn’t automatically handle that.

Leverage a CMS

Popular Content Management Systems like WordPress make a developer’s life much easier. A CMS takes the burden of creating content, managing content, and building a content database system away from the developer. A CMS also provides a solid foundation to build your site upon. Using a pre-made CMS will significantly reduce website development expenses.

Document Your Code

Quality code documentation that follows established standards is an upfront investment that will save you a lot of time and frustration in the future. Many developers may have their hands in a project over its lifetime, so documenting code makes the transition much easier. Additionally, developers may revisit code years after they wrote it, so documentation will be extremely helpful in making sense of old code.

Rewrite Overcomplicated Code

Experienced developers tend to abandon and rewrite code that isn’t working out more quickly than their less experienced counterparts. If your website documentation explaining how a code segment works is longer than the actual code, the code likely could be rewritten to operate more efficiently and be easier to read. Questions about rewriting and revising code can help a business determine what to look for in a website developer.

Be Careful with Third-Party Content

As a developer, third-party content can make your job far more complicated because it shifts control away from your platform. If possible, develop tools that streamline using third-party content to prevent users from submitting detrimental content. Third-party content can be particularly bad for load times and site performance, so use it wisely and infrequently.

Going HTTPS is not like flipping a Switch

Switching a website from HTTP to Secure HTTP, or HTTPS, is actually a very development-involved process. HTTPS encrypts all data between the user and the website, which better protects user data. In addition to enabling the secure delivery certificate, developers need to update the site code to redirect any information calls including pages, images, and scripts to HTTPS. Web browsers won’t register a site as fully HTTPS compliant if any content comes through on the site in HTTP, which can be difficult to police with third-party content, user-created content, and advertisements. Developers can also implement adjustments to help users avoid adding non-HTTPS compliant content. However, particularly with third-party content, it might be impossible to be fully https compliant.

Optimise Metadata for Social Media

Like search engines, social media is a major website traffic driver. Unlike search engines, social media platforms often require non-standard metadata, or information about a given webpage for machine use, to determine how to display links to content. Both Facebook and Twitter use unique tagging systems that build upon standard metadata tags. While the information has a substantial crossover with existing metadata, the platforms still require additional information. Poor website development practices will make managing your platform more difficult and expensive than it needs to be. Knowing what to look for in a website development in Australia partner for your business can make all the difference in the final product. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you develop an optimised website platform.

Book a Free Site Audit and Consultation

website development

Our Web Development Difference

The Best Web Development

Ongoing Support

We are not leaving you high and dry after passing over your beautiful new site. We are in it for the long haul, for the life of your business with us we will make sure your site is firing on all cylinders, at all times.

Refine, Revise

Your new site will be fluid once we hand it over. Do not think the final product we hand over is the FINAL product. We are always here to add new pages for you, tinker with design if you feel the mood swing. Your site will continue to evolve with us.

Hosting

We can look after all your hosting needs as well, if you want to take another task of the hands of your team. We use one of the pre-eminent web hosting services and you can rest easy your site speed and stability are in the safest of hands.

WordPress

We choose to run the majority of our websites off WordPress because of its flexibility, stability and SEO awesomeness. It is also an easy platform for you to use yourselves. Once we hand over your lovely site you will easily be able to update it yourselves.

Personal Service

We pride ourselves on the relationships we develop with our clients. They mean everything to us and because of that you have access to us when you need it. You need a chat about anything to do with your site? We are here for you.

Hungry Learners

Our design and dev team are voracious learners. They want to know every trend, every update, every evolution of the web design game. They have an almost unhealthy love of this world. But they learn, they implement and you benefit.

website Development

Agile’s Web Development Services

You have poured time, money and sweat into creating the perfect website, the flagship of your business. Time to sit back, put your feet up and let the good times roll, right?

Absolutely not. You are going to want to get to know your web developer quite well over the years because you want to keep your website as up-to-date, not to mention working and as functional, as possible.

Post-Launch Web Development Tasks:

Website Lifecycle is Ongoing

Obviously after the launch of your site website development requirements do slow down. However making sure your website is always working as well as it should have does require some maintenance. The site must be optimised at all times, old and redundant content needs to be removed, broken links must be fixed quickly and SEO algorithm changes must be adjusted for on site.

The Future

Technology and trends are changing so quickly these days that cutting edge innovation on a site can almost seem obsolete in a couple of short years. You will want a good web developer who is across these changes who can keep your site at forefront of now. You do not want a site that looks dated and performs poorly just a couple of years after you invest in it. Change is good and your site can be kept fresh and fluid through good web development.

Scalability

Hopefully you want your business to grow steadily over the years and eventually you are going to have to scale operations. If an eCommerce site you may need to add a host of new products, you may have to add more options for payment, you may just be getting more traffic, fingers crossed, than your launch site could handle. You need a good web developer who can come in and add functionality and increase stability.

Add-ons

You will always have a need to add more content and functionality to your site. With the importance of SEO now unique content is paramount and you should be adding blog posts and thought leadership pieces regularly. Your web developer will be able to help you add what you need but even better they should have set up a site where you can bring much of this new content creation and website upload in-house. There are a number of content management system (CMS) platforms, such as WordPress and Joomla, that you can take over yourself once your development team has launched your site on them. It is imperative you keep your content refreshed on site. Nothing screams out of touch and irrelevant like outdated content.

At Agile we will happily hand over your site once it is launched but we are also in a great position, knowing everything about your build, to keep supporting you over the journey.

We are on hand to host and provide support for the long haul and we can help keep your site as fresh and functional as the day it was launched.

10 Ways To Boost Your SEO Right Now

Click Here

Agile knowledge base

For A Free, No Obligation Consultation

Enquire Now