Notes

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

The objective of this post is to provide some tips on what makes an excellent web development company, and will 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 this. In the event that you disagree with anything we have been certainly available to discussing it further.

Now to begin the post. Here are the key areas we will be looking at, and what you need 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 strategies surrounding the projects
Invests time in research and development
Includes a rigorous testing process, including automated tests
Flexible to change
Use source control
In a position to do both front-end and back-end development
We don't subscribe to idea of developers that front-end development and developers that do back-end development. That's the exact carbon copy of having a plumber who only fits pipes and leaves the fitting of the baths, showers, sinks and toilets to someone else.

We agree there is a separation between web developers and web designers, there is a completely different thought process going on there, however the separation between front-end and back-end is merely wrong. To be a good web developer you must understand the entire development cycle and to be able to get involved in the project from start 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 that are befitting web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net and PHP (and others). They all have their strengths and weaknesses rather than one is perfect. An excellent web development company ought to be flexible where technologies they use, so they use the most appropriate one for his or her clients' needs.

The key reason we've spent time learning a variety of technologies is to in a position to pick and choose the bits we like. Over time the developers involved in The League have been in a position to take the good parts of each technology and formulate a number of 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 best practices that you follow. As technologies come and go inside our very fast moving industry those best practices will remain, or at least evolve. As Houston web development in case 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 a number 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 online marketing strategy of a project. That is generally because developers don't care. Well they should. How can they advise clients and consider helping clients produce the right solution, if they aren't thinking about the "dilemna" (sorry, we realize 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're just being a meat puppet.

The most crucial question a developer can ask is "Why?". Remember to understand the client's requirements fully, and advise them, after all of 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 an extremely 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 check out new trends and technologies. Admittedly some of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you won't know if you don't look into them.

If you need to know in case a web development company knows there stuff, simply inquire further what their developers have been looking into recently. You don't have to understand all you are told, note them down though and appearance them up on the web to understand if the business are considering new trends or not.

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

Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests
Too often we have seen the client may be the tester for a project. If this is happening, then, to place it bluntly, the development company hardly understand your project well enough, they're 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 write more concise code. More concise code means the code base is easier to understand and cheaper to keep up.
Website: https://www.gulfstatesoftware.com/web-development-in-houston/