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What Makes a Good Web Development Company The world of web development is still very much misunderstood. We've even heard folks call it a"dark art". So once you need help turning your ideas and designs to some premium quality site or web application, how do you know who you can trust to do this?

The purpose of this article is to supply some key tips on what makes a fantastic web development firm, and will help you understand the type of questions that you should be asking development companies.

This is going to be a very opinionated article and we make no apologies for it. Should you disagree with whatever we're certainly open to discussing it further.

Now to get on with the article. Below are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and exactly what you ought to be searching for in a web development company.

Able to do both front-end and back-end development Don't specialise in one back-end technology Should follow best practices Understanding of marketing approaches surrounding the jobs Invests time in research and development Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests

Flexible to change Use source control Able to do both front-end and back-end development We do not subscribe to thought of developers that do backend development and developers that do backend development. That's the equivalent of having a plumber that only fits pipes and leaves the fitting of their bathrooms, showers, sinks and toilets to someone else.

We agree there's a separation between web developers and web designers, so there's a very different thought process going on there, however, the separation between backend and backend is just wrong. To be a fantastic web developer you need to understand the entire development cycle and also to be able to become involved in the project from begin to finish. There's also much to be learnt by the working with the varying technologies, but we will come on to that.

Don't specialise in a single back-end technology There are a range of great back-end technologies that are acceptable for web development such as Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net and PHP (and many others ). All of them have their strengths and weaknesses and not one is ideal. A fantastic web development company ought to be adaptable in which technology they use, so they use the most appropriate one for their clients' needs.

The key reason we have spent time learning a number of technologies is to able to pick and choose the bits we like. Over the years the developers involved in The League have been able to take the good parts of each technology and formulate a number of best practices and use them across all platforms.

Should follow best practices The key to being a good web developer is not the technologies that you use, but the best practices that you follow. As technologies come and go in our very fast moving industry those best practices will remain, or at least evolve. As a developer if you have a good grounding then you can move with the times and technologies fairly easily.

So what are these best practices that we are talking about. Below are some of the key ones we follow.

Writing semantic HTML Follow web standards for all front end coding Automated testing of both front-end and back-end code Use of a MVC framework Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects We've heard this complaint many times that web developers don't think about the marketing strategy of a project. This is generally because developers don't care. Well they should. How can

they advise clients and think about helping clients produce the right solution, if they aren't thinking about the "bigger picture" (sorry, we know it's a horrid phrase, we'll go wash our mouths out now).

If a developer blindly does the work, they are not offering the client a service, they are just being a meat puppet.

The most important question a developer can ask is "Why?" . Take time to understand the client's requirements fully, and advise them, after all the client doesn't understand the ins and outs of web development, you do. Make the development cycle a two way conversation.

Invests time in research and development As everyone knows the web industry is a very fast moving industry. Things come and go in the blink of an eye. A good web development company gives it's developers allocated time each week to look at new trends and technologies. Admittedly some of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you won't know unless you look into them.

If you want to know if a web development company knows there stuff, simply ask them what their developers have been looking into recently. You don't have to understand everything you are told, note them down though and look them up on the internet to understand if the company are looking at new trends or not.

R&D is probably the most important time each week for a developer. If developers don't evolve, the solutions they build will become stagnate and dated very quickly. As a client do you want an out of date solution before you even start?

Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests Too often we have seen the client is the tester for a project. If this is happening, then, to put it bluntly, the development company don't understand your project well enough, they are just"banging " code.

A good web development company should be writing automated tests (integration tests, unit-tests etc) for all their code, both front-end and back-end. On a simple level, tests help developers to concentrate on the code they are writing at that given time, they also help developers to write more concise code. More concise code means the code base is easier to understand and cheaper to maintain.

The major benefit of a test suite to a client is that when changes are made to the code in the project there can be a lot more confidence in the fact that the change, or new code, hasn't broken anything else.

We are not saying automated testing is the silver bullet of web development, and tests are only effective if they are written well, but they certainly should be part of any web developers toolset.

Automated tests aren't the only important aspect of testing. The web development company should also have a level of human testing as well, and this is certainly something clients should be involved in. User stories are key to this process. As part of the development process, clients should work with the web development company to put together User stories, so that all parties involved understand how users will interact with the site or application and the results of those interactions.

Flexible to change We've all heard developers complaining how their clients' alter the requirements of a job midway thought a job. Developers should quit complaining about this, it occurs to us all and it's never going to change. A fantastic web development company should have procedures in place to deal with change. If you are a client, ask how change requests will be managed.

Web developers should work to short release cycles, rather 1 - 2 weeks. The worst thing that can happen to a project is that the developers get the short, begin the work and then 2 months after they declare it's completed, only for the customer to say"This isn't what I asked for!" . By working to short release cycles, clients can be involved at all stages. At the conclusion of each release the customer should review the job so far and submit some change requests.

Use resource control Our final recommendation is a fairly clear and easy one, to most folks, but we nevertheless talk to developers who don't use any sort of resource control. This seems more widespread with salespeople as they don't find the requirement since they are the only ones working on the code. If that's how they view it, then they are missing the point.

There are lots of reasons why all code ought to be source controlled. We are are only going to mention a few key points . Primarily it's a wonderful way of maintaining a log of changes made to code. (As long as developers put a comment to the commit). Secondly and most importantly is allows developers to change code without the fear of losing already work already done. This is especially useful when trying out other potential coding solutions to a problem. Find out more info click Saytların yığılması