For Web Development & CMS
What is web design?
Website development is pretty simple. It's the nuts & bolts of what makes a website work. Whether it's interactive forms, fancy transition effects, or translating a flat design into something more tangible, I am able to realize that need for my clients. It is necessary to combine brand signals into this process, but it is not a core part of what development is 90% of the time.
Website development from the ground up
I have made websites for clients from all backgrounds and needs. When I originally started, I created websites from the ground up, coding everything by hand and doing only what was needed.
This is still an option for many of my clients, and produces sleek, fast and ultra-optimized websites. However, many clients require a host of functionality not commonly built from the ground-up. This is where pre-built solutions come into play.
CMS - Content Management System(s) integration
The term CMS has become more commonplace with clients. Most people know it as a "backend" that has some form of "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get.) This merely informs the functionality of a site.
There are many CMS systems out there: Blogging software like wordpress, moveabletype, type3 to E-Commerce CMS solutions like Magento, OpenCart, Prestashop, Drupal Ubercart and many more. There are so many CMS's' out there, it's not hard to find one that will fit your need. But often times they fall short in one way or another, at least out of the box.
For that reason, it's great to have someone who knows how to integrate a CMS solution, add new functionality and even "server harden" the often-times insecure CMS packages that are full of holes that hackers can exploit (sql injections, comment-spam anyone?)
Not only that, integrating a completely custom design will be a different process for every CMS out there. So it's good to know someone that can integrate it easily and efficiently.
Standards compliance, browser testing, semantics and "pretty code"
Often times, clients don't fully understand the need for this stuff. But they know when it's not there. When sites break for their clients, it's crunch time. Fixing these problems is always a hassle, especially when dealing with outdated browsers and operating systems. Users will easily get frustrated and may leave your site, never to return.
That's what these practices solve.
Standards compliance is making a website conform to some basic standards, defined by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) who are a non-profit group that create basic guidelines for the entire web to operate on.
Browser testing is simply testing a site on all the popular browsers --Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and yes, even Internet Explorer. These days, most browsers are "up-to-snuff" on standards and code-rendering, but the occasional need for Internet Explorer 6 support does come up for some clients. You may be one of them. No problemo!
Semantics is the act of making a web page more semantic. Semantic means the information contained in a web page is marked in a way that makes it easier for search engines and applications to understand what exactly it is. A machine cannot read the text verbatim and think about what a site is. So it has to categorize it somehow. Semantics makes the job easier.
Pretty code is just a good practice. It means making clean code, commenting on that code, and just making it easier to work with. If the need to bring in other people arises, programmers and designers alike will appreciate well commented and organized code.
Speed testing is becoming more important for users. A website can quickly get bogged down with unnecessary code, trivial blocks of data, feeds and fancy graphics, animations and video. Speed testing is optimizing the site in as many ways possible, from scrunching image sizes down to "caching" (remembering) a sites assets and not re-downloading them from scratch every single time. Speed testing is an important step in any website development process.