Notes

What Makes an excellent Web Development Company
The world of web development continues to be very much misunderstood. We've even heard people call it a "dark art". So when you need help turning your opinions and designs right into a top quality website or web application, how will you know who it is possible to trust to accomplish this?

The objective of this post is to provide some tips on what makes an excellent web development company, and can help you understand the kind of questions you ought to be asking development companies.

This is going to be considered a very opinionated post and we make no apologies for it. If you disagree with anything we are certainly open to discussing it further.

Now to begin the post. Here are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and 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 guidelines
Knowledge of marketing strategies surrounding the projects
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 don't subscribe to idea of developers that front-end development and developers that back-end development. That's the equivalent of having a plumber who only fits pipes and leaves the fitting of the baths, showers, sinks and toilets to another person.

We agree there exists a separation between web designers and web designers, there's a completely different way of thinking going on there, however the separation between front-end and back-end is merely wrong. To be a good web developer you need to understand the entire development cycle and to be capable of geting mixed up in project from begin to finish. There is also much to be learnt from the working with the varying technologies, but we'll seriously to that.

Don't specialise in one back-end technology
There are a variety of good back-end technologies which are befitting web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net and PHP (and others). Each of them have their strengths and weaknesses rather than one is perfect. An excellent web development company should be flexible where technologies they use, so that they use the best suited one for his or her clients' needs.

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

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

Just what exactly are these best practices that we are talking about. Below are web development company Houston 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 believe about the marketing strategy of a project. That is generally because developers don't care. Well they should. How do they advise clients and think about helping clients produce the proper solution, if they aren't thinking about the "bigger picture" (sorry, we know it is a horrid phrase, we'll go wash our mouths out now). If a developer blindly does the task, they're not offering your 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 intricacies 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 an extremely fast moving industry. Things come and go in the blink of a watch. An excellent web development company gives it's developers allocated time every week to check out new trends and technologies. Admittedly many of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you won't know unless you look into them.

In order to know in case a web development company knows there stuff, simply ask them what their developers have already been looking into recently. You don't need to understand everything you are told, note them down though and appearance 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 can be stagnate and dated rapidly. As a client do you want an outdated 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 that is happening, then, to put it bluntly, the development company hardly understand your project well enough, they are just "banging out" code.

A good web development company should be writing automated tests (integration tests, unit-tests etc) for several their code, both front-end and back-end. On a simple level, tests help developers to focus on the code they are writing at that given time, they also help developers to create more concise code. More concise code means the code base is easier to comprehend and cheaper to keep.
My Website: https://www.gulfstatesoftware.com/web-development-in-houston/