Web Development in 2023

[kevinted92]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum and I'm looking to get some advice on corporate website development. I'm currently in the process of developing a website for a large corporate business, and I'm looking for some tips and tricks to help ensure the project goes as smoothly as possible.

I'm not sure where to start with the development process and I'm looking for some advice on the best tools and techniques to use. I'd also like to hear from anyone who has had experience developing corporate websites and can provide some insight on what to expect throughout the process.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[CeaSaR]

Hi.

I was hoping that someone else with a little more recent experience than I, would respond. I'm more of a Web 3.0 type of guy, with a bit of 5.0 and CSS from when my kids had to take web development for a class.

Anyway, what I am going to suggest is not so much about the languages used, but rather common sense and good flow for the user. After all, the point of the site is to get the user what they need efficiently.

1. Flashy sites are great, for about 2 minutes. After that, people want to get down to the business at hand. Make the site easy to navigate, don't hide the navigation menus or other necessary menus. They should be easy to access and actually be useful. If it doesn't help the user get to where they need to go or want to go, it's pretty useless.
2. Make the site easy to read, ie, make sure the colors you use for background and text work well together. Light blue on light grey is not a good pairing, for example. And bright bleeding red on a black background can hurt the eyes. Take some hints from your friendly word processor.
3. Remove bloat. Even in today's world of high speed connections and blazing devices, bloat can make a site sluggish. A million words of code salad for one short page is just poor coding. If you write efficient code that loads pages in an instant, you'll be heralded as a God, at least by the user.
4. This should probably be the first point, but here goes. Understand just what the client is expecting of the site, ie what their mission is - like provide a shopping site or an informational site, and ask how the user should be able to use it. If you have to, use sketches to plot out how it should look / flow.
5. As you work along and find combinations of layout and css, etc. that work well together, save them as templates. Don't reinvent the wheel every time.

Hope this is at least somewhat helpful.

[dyarker]

Research the specifications and TEST, RETEST the pages off-line.

An example - I had to do business with an agency (unnamed). Tried to open an on line account part was inputting my ZIP code. The web page kept telling me ZIP code must have 5 digits. Well my APO ZIP, and some New England states have "0" (zero) as a first character. As a part time coder I recognized that the ZIP was being converted to a number, and anything less than 10000 was rejected.

Either the page writer did not research ZIP code structure or did not test enough to catch his/her error. This cost me 45 minutes on hold on an international call. Whoever you make web pages for will not be happy about angry customers.

Or, an on line page selling electronic parts leaves out important specs to make the page "prettier".

You get the idea.

Cheers,