We have now arrived at the most interesting part of the professional website development process. It’s the development time YAY! It’s time to get our hand dirty.
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During development we will certainly need tools to help us achieving what we have planned before. I personally use the following tools at the very least:
– EditPlus Text Editor or Adobe DreamWeaver
– Any development/coding tools such as Visual Studio or text editors for PHP development, etc
– Other tools such as Adobe Flash, etc
Adobe Photoshop
Using Adobe Photoshop we will create the website prototype. I will detail later what this is all about. In a nutshell, we will be creating images on how the actual website will look like (ie. the end “product”). We will design all layouts that have been approved prior.
We will then send these images to client so that client can see and approve what the final products will be. Remember, when developing websites we have to encourage client to approve everything up-front before we even start the development. Any changes/modifications have to be discussed up-front as much as we can otherwise the delivery of the final product may be delayed.
There will always be changes during the development but as a professional web developer we have to be able to – somehow – make those changes as “out-of-scope”. Therefore, the decision is then on client on whether to implement those changes or not. I will discuss about this later.
HTML Editors
HTML editors such as EditPlus or Adobe DreamWeaver will help us a lot in producing the HTML code. After we design the prototype (see above), it’s time for us to then “cutting up” those prototypes into HTML which can then be incorporated into a programming language such as ASP.NET or PHP for producing dynamic websites.
These text editors will help us doing the “cutting up”. I will elaborate more on this later.
Dynamic Website/Coding Tools
What is static website vs dynamic website? Static website means that the HTML code on the website is static. If someone needs to update the content of this website, he has to literally edit and update the HTML code. Dynamic website means the HTML code is generated “on-the-fly” (eg. from database).
There are heaps of programming languages out there that can help us producing dynamic websites such as ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, PERL, CGI, etc. These programming languages generally have their own “editor”. The difference between this editor and HTML editor is it can load “commands/libraries” that are specific to the programming language.
If you need to develop dynamic websites (which most of the websites nowadays are), you will certainly need these tools. They will save you a lot of time and plus you don’t have to memorize the commands/syntax that are relevant to the programming language.
Other Supporting Tools
You can also use other supporting tools such as Adobe Flash to create flash animations, etc.
UAT and Test Environment
It is extremely important to always have User Acceptance Test (UAT) and Test Environment. This will be used for testing and client demo. You will not want to use the live hosting space for your client demo because search engine may crawl it and there is a chance of visitors coming to the website that is not ready yet. This may hurt the website later on.
Test Environment can be your own laptop/computer while UAT is normally hosted or at least accessible remotely by client. Try to make your UAT environment isolated from public visitors. You can use a temporary domain name eg. http://test.clientdomainname.com/ or something.
Testing is always important as it is a part of quality control. By having UAT also, client can see the progress and they will like you! They can also make comments on the current progress of the website. You have to always be aware that what you send as a prototype may look different on the browser.
Conclusion
So…this is the development process in a nutshell. I will of course elaborate more on this. We will go much deeper than this. Later on we will talk about development methodologies such as Agile, SCRUM, etc. It’s all about fun fun fun…. 🙂
Cheers,
Tommy
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Tommy Segoro
tommy@tfsconsulting.com.au
+61 404 457 754
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