Web design and development considerations

Reflecting your corporate image

A website that is up-to-date and utilising the latest design and development techniques is a refection of the company behind it. In this day and age a company's website and their web applications are normally the first experience in the business-to-consumer relationship.

Keeping your website design sharp is an important strand of business development. Poor websites give a bad first impression, and leave a potential customer frustrated. Perhaps the website "works" but has lost the flair that it once had, leading to an impression that the company is out-dated and behind the curve.

Past experience, new technology

Bleeding edge website design does not mean new for new's sake. It means analysing the current state of web design and development and taking the knowledge of past experience and making sound decisions about what new technologies are on the right trajectory.

XML technology is a good example of this. The year 2000 saw an increased awareness of XML, and certainly, the reality of the Hype Curve played out for the years to come. The industry needed to experience XML in many ways to come to a realisation that it did not solve all problems --and certainly it created a few. Since then, IT technology has matured, and now many solutions that implemented XML 10 years ago are now using JSON and the RESTful approach. Certainly that does not mean the problem has been completely solved, neither does it mean that use cases for XML are gone. Both technologies have their own place and the pros and cons of both need to be considered carefully.

Page load-time responsiveness

A website also needs for perform -period. It cannot only 'look good' it needs to work and impress a customer --a real person-- not only the regular automated services owned by the search engine companies. Page load speed is sometimes a slightly subconscious affair. Pages that load slower as time goes by may not register for the owner, they may be transfixed with another feature of the website or individual web-page and fail to realise that the user-experience is sub-par.

When your website loads quickly, your customer can spend more time on your site. It must be understood in this day-and-age a customer almost certainly will have several web-browser tabs open, and may also have something else downloading in the background. This is the bandwidth paradox; When the capability to download increases by 2, the demand will increase by a factor of 3.