Website development is where you take your website design and turn it into a fully functional site using compliment and accessible code. It’s important that your website is easy to use and complies with modern web accessibility standards.
With 2012 seeing an further increase in online purchasing and e-commerce it’s essential that you develop a strong online presence to ensure your website out performs the competition at every turn. I provide website development services to clients around Hampshire & Surrey and will be happy to help you improve your website.
When developing a website you need to give careful consideration to your page content, website structure, website domain name, maintenance and future growth.
Page Content
The page content (aka: website copy) is one of the most important aspects of website development. Having well written content on your website with targeted keywords for each page could make all the difference between a successful website and a failing website.
Website Structure
Website structure is a term used to describe how the pages of your website are organised. Website visitors need to quickly understand the purpose of your site, and having a good site structure ensures that visitors and search engines can quickly and easily determine what your site is about. Good website structure makes it quick and easy for visitors to navigate through your site.
Website Name
Website / Domain name is important for 2 reasons:
- Search Engine Optimisation - Search engines use words in your domain names as a ranking factor. If your website is being setup to promote a single product then use the product name in the URL, otherwise its good to include keywords separated using a hyphen to get the best results for your domain.
- Target Audience - Major search engines such as Google have country specific versions that people can use to search for websites in their country, so choosing a .co.uk domain would be better suited to the UK market where as .fr would be used for French websites.
Website Maintenance
Website maintenance is another important factor that would need to be considered during the design phase. You could pay a website developer on a per hourly basis to update your site or you could opt for a content management system, that allows you to edit and update the website yourself.
Future Growth
Future growth is something we as developers need to think about when planning how we’re going to build your website. After the website is built you will probably want to add or remove areas of the site, manage content or possibly add new features and functionality. If you’ve factored future growth at the start of the project then future website amends will be a simple and pain-free process.
Web development using HTML5
HTML is the fundamental language that all websites are programmed in. HTML5 has been released to solve problems, innovate the development process and give developers the necessary tools to bring your website to life. All modern web browsers (the program you use to view pages on the internet) are constantly improving to support the new standards introduced with HTML5. Some of the new features that really excite me are:
- HTML5 video allows video playback without the need of external flash video players
- Offline web applications that work without an internet connection
- Push technology so we can send updates from the web server to the visitor of the website
HTML5 is still the new kid on the block, and a lot of the new features are not supported by all browsers yet but this has always been a common problem with new technology!