Still the world of web development is quite misunderstood and many people call it as a ‘dark art’. When you require assisting changing your notions and web designs into a superior quality site or application, how do you exactly know whom you can trust to get this done? The aim of this post is to think of some points that makes a professional and good web development company and will help you to ascertain about the type of queries you should be asking with them. The best measures and key points you should be looking in a web development company are as follows:
- Capable to do both front and back-end – We don’t really look for developers that do only front-end development and leaves for someone else the back-end development. Though, there are different duty and responsibility in between web developers and web designers but a completely different thought process is going on there as the separation in between front-end and back-end is simply inappropriate. Being a good developer means, you need to have full and thorough understanding of the complete development cycle and has to be involved in the project from start to finish. Adding to this, there is much to be learnt from working and operating with changing technologies, but we will come later on that.
- Follow best and standard practices – The major key to being a good and professional web developer not only depends on technology they are using but in fact in the best practices that you follow. As the technologies were like going back and forth in this technological industry, but the best strategies will evolve or at least remain. As a web developer if you have a good base then you can really move the times along with the technology fairly easily. The best practices that need to be followed are writing semantic HTML, using a MVC framework, following web standards for all front-end coding and working on automated testing of both front-end and back-end code.
- Not specialized in only one back-end technology – There is a myriad number of good back-end technologies apt for web development such as PHP, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails and more. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses and a good web development company must be flexible which technology they have been using, in order to make the most apt and ideal one suiting their clients’ needs. The major reason we have spent a lot of time in telling about a number of technologies is to able to choose and select the bits we prefer. Over the period of time, web developers have been capable to grab the good parts of each technology and devise a large number of best-in practices and use them all across the platforms.
- Invests time in research as well as development – Web industry is a fast moving one and things come and go just with a blink of an eye. A good web development firm gives proper time to research and have a keen look at new trends and technologies. This is so true that some of them are like dead ends, but you will never ever come to know especially without looking over them. Research and development is by far one of the most significant things that could be done by a developer. As a customer you will never wish to have an outdated solution before you start, right.
- Good understanding of the marketing strategies – We heard this from many customers that developers don’t think about the marketing strategy of a project. It is generally because web developers simply don’t care but they should. How can they suggest them creating the right solution especially if they are not considering the bigger picture? If developers tend to render the work blindly, they are not providing clients’ services in fact just being treated as meat puppets. It is always advised to take out time to understand the client’s requirements completely and suggest them all the ins and outs of web development, you will do and deliver. Try to make the web development cycle a two way conversation for efficacy and better results.
- Flexible to change – We all have heard about how clients’ could change the needs of a project midway all throughout a project. Web developers require stopping complaining all about this, though it happens to all of us and never ever going to change. In order to cope up with the change, always ask with the clients how change requests will be handled. And the development cycle should be flexible enough so that at the end of each release, client could review the project and submit any change requests.
- Make use of source control – This is our final recommendation and is quite a simple one and it is always advisable to developers who don’t make any use of source control. It seems extensive with freelancers as they don’t see the requirement as they are the only one working on the source code. If this is how you see it, then for sure you are missing the whole plot.
- Conducts a rigorous testing process involving automated tests – Usually most often we heard that the client is the tester for a project and if this happens the web development company is just banging out the code and not understanding your project aptly. A good and professional web development company must be writing automated tests including unit tests, integration tests and more for all their code at both front-end and back-end. On a simple note, tests assist web developers to focus on the code they are writing at that given period of time but also help them to write concise code. The basic advantage of a test suite to a customer is that when edits are made to the project code there can be a lot more confidence and certainty in the fact that new code has not broken anything. We are not depicting that automated testing is like the silver spoon of web development and tests are efficient only if they are written well but for sure must be a part of any web developer tool set. The web development companies should not always use automated tests but also human testing as well as it is for sure something clients would be involved in. As an integral part of the development process, clients should also put together user stories so that users get the chance to interact with the application or site and the result of those interactions.
In addition, there are whole lot of reasons why all code should be source controlled. Only a couple of points have been mentioned in the same. This is a great way of keeping a log of changes made to code. The other reason is it lets developers to change the code without any fear of losing already completed work. It is beneficial especially when figuring out the other possible coding solutions to an issue. One such leading and great web development company is ‘Web Outsourcing Team’ that is extremely professional and catering its clients from years one of the best web development solutions of the industry. Feel free to connect with them at mail@weboutsourcingteam.com and this is for sure that your concerns will be discussed and solved with uttermost accuracy and finest results.
