Wednesday, 05 November 2008
The vast majority of people who would like to have a website or web application don’t care about the technologies, programming languages and many other «technical issues». The most important thing for them is that the website must have certain functionality, needed design level and style, have good usability and SEO. But web applications are like icebergs — just 10% is above the water and sooner or later you will need to know what is about these 90% that is not visible.
Here I must say that if you are planning to hire the only and always available for you web development company for ever then this note is not for you. But if you wouldn’t like to be dependent on the only web partner for the rest of your life it can be useful.
Here are a couple of common situations from the real life:
Situation #1. In a while you would like to make some changes with you website. For example extend functionality, add new useful features. You go to another web development company and explain what you need. And what is happening? It turns out that even minor changes are not easy and cheap to be done. Some web developers even say that you need to make everything from scratch! That’s how you find out that despite the fact your website works just as you want other programmers need to spend heaps of time to understand the code, to understand the logic of applications and make changes. All this results in time and money lost.
Situation #2. Your web application becomes popular. Let’s say you have a social networking website. You spend a lot of time promoting it, people are interested and you are successful! But for some reason your website doesn’t satisfy visitors from the point of speed of work. Video sharing is slow,
So at some point you understand that it’s not only about functionality, design, usability, SEO. It is very important to know that you are getting a quality product. The quality means that your web application must follow W3C standards, the database should be properly designed, coding style must be logical and easy to understand for other web developers. And these are just a few main things.
Of course it doesn’t mean that you need to get into the web technologies if you would like somebody to build your website, but we would strongly recommend you demand guarantees and the provider must prove the quality of the services as well. The next note will be devoted to the questions of assuring the quality of web development services.
Why do we post our notes?
Our notes are mainly intended for our potential clients. These notes will be also helpful to people who would like to get their website done and they don’t have much experience working with web development companies.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about our notes or would like to give us your feedback.