Considering web development as a web career? Then you need to be up to date with the realities, opportunities and what you need to make a living therein.
Web development is the process of designing executable web facilities that can operate over the internet or an intranet.
Web development as a career takes us into discussing coding and programming – these are methods of building websites and applications.
Seeking knowledge to start a career in web development or get the right solution for your ideas and businesses let us be looking at some of the career roles.
Coding Vs Programming?
Coding is concerned with writing computer languages into compilers for several web functions, programming involves integration, development and a wider angle of experiences to create executable web applications/software.
So, we begin by exploring a number of useful trends with web technologies, business needs, growth and other important considerations.
To understand the trend, let us look at some of the important web development principles – consider these factors core questions that every web developer or solution provider must answer.
Design Intentions
Every website owner must be able to answer the basic question, as to what solution (or uses) does the website come to provide.
All web development principles that this topic will uncover are important considerations that make up the web development principles.
Web Development Principles
These are web development fundamental truth and current propositions – globally accepted standards that separate quality websites from poorly structured sites.
Navigation Features
The first intention of any website is to accommodate users (visitors, returning visitors, members etc.)
A website with poor navigates will compel many visitors to leave the website in the first 15 seconds of their visit to the site.
To design websites with these robust features that will make navigation easy for users, considerations should include hosting plans, the design, the content management system Career | Wed Development Skills and Trends in 2021s, available plugins and so on.
Navigation is very important to users because they need to understand if your website can help them or not.
Important pages like About Us, Our Services, Contact – all they should be designed with elegance, load speed and visibility in mind.
Of course, to achieve this as a developer, you should be very familiar with customization and optimization coding, extensive design experience, including the use of templates.
Layout
Basic website technologies like HTML and CSS decide the layout of a website – and this means how the website will look. It includes the dimension (size) of the site, the sections of the website and placeholders.
It is upon the already built layout that the website will accommodate more texts, images, video and other elements of the website.
The entire website credibility can be affected by the design layout.
Meanwhile, as a developer or website owner, there are 5 factors to consider: device, browser, resolution, colour and expectation.
These web development factors are interwoven and point to each other in making
Visual Appeal
How appealing do your websites visitors see its contents? The quality of the colour, font and other attributes of the text is what makes the site more readable and appealing on display.
In ensuring a quality visual website here is a number of factors to look into; the font type, the font size, the colour of text and links, theme colour and every other setting that affect how users see the website.
How to Choose a Great Website Color Scheme
This is one area that gets a lot of developers and businesses into a disagreement – and even though there is no defined colour for best sites, the tips below can help you make the right colour decisions for the new website gig:
- Study Colour Psychology
- Learn About Colour Theory
- Try Many Colours Combinations
- Go for Simplicity
- Integrate your Branding
- You can also make use of Color Pallet to decide matched texts and color combination.
Speed (Load Time)
Beyond importance to users, site load speed is one of the core qualities required by Google and most other search engines in respect to ranking web pages and boosting the visibility of the business.
It is, however, observed that heavy CSS and JavaScript use can be detrimental to the load speed of the website.
Other factors that slow down websites include but are not limited to those Java Script Files with a number of functionalities to the front-end of your website. It includes Bad Server Hosting, Poor Coding standards and the use of too many plugins.
Security
As a developer or business owner, one of the most terrifying moments is to watch your website content get lost for any reason whatsoever.
On daily basis, we witness data breaches and hacks of important websites. It is also important to understand the dynamics of these ‘bad guys’ and extend your website security beyond backups.
Recently, HostGator submitted a finding that 43% of all data breaches have small businesses as their victims.
To get things right for your business or that of clients, you need to include the following in your security strategies:
1. Installation of Security Plugins
2. HTTPS Protection (Most web hosting providers offer this service)
3. Keep your Website Software up to Date
4. Invest in Automatic Backup
5. Utilize Strong Password
6. Use Content Security Policy (CSP)
7. Be careful with file upload
Read More: Most Effective Ways to Secure your Website from Data Breaches
Current Web Development Trends
Today’s programming involves the right combination of already existing tools, integration and human-oriented algorithmic thinking.
These methods are still highly needed in the design of solutions like school portals, eCommerce stores, marketing software, robust blogs and so on.
Content Management Software
Understanding the features and uses of powerful content management software like WordPress, WooCommerce, Blogger, Shopify can help you transform ideas into great pages without having to code a single line.
In other words, the walls covering web development (struggle with coding) have been destroyed with the emergence of content management systems.
These are super technologies developed by adhering to code reusability principles in replicating web pages, features and functions.
Withing these technologies, such as what we have in WordPress, thousands of frameworks and languages have been used to develop applications and extensions within the community.
These plugins are so sophisticated that with a number of clicks you can build a very complex website.
Shopify
Shopify is a standalone eCommerce software/solution with a number of templates, plugins and is open for a wide scope of interpretations possibilities such as in payment, transactional and marketing emails and sales automation.
Shopify is a web facility that has been specifically designed to allow business owners to build and launch their own online store.
With Shopify, a store can be built online in just a few minutes.
Joomla
Joomla is a free open-source content management system for publishing web content on websites such as blogs.
It is great for building web content apps like forums, photo galleries, eCommerce and other web applications to its capacity.
For websites that require user accounts, registrations, and other features, Joomla as a content management system is great.
Even though, we WordPress plugins sites with amazing features and functionalities can be developed.
Joomla offer greets user management features with a fantastic interface that is close to none in the world.
It’s easy to understand and navigate – Joomla will help you design sites where control is ensured.
Blogger
Blogger is a Google-powered content management system that enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries.
In Africa, popular bloggers like Linda Ikeji used free blogger platforms to build millions of audiences and multi-million blogging businesses as a Nigerian.
However, owing to the competition today, business owners and new bloggers need more practical resources and knowledge of these trends to master their craft and stand a chance of earning a living blogging.
Blogging is made lost easier with booth bloggers and WordPress but in terms of functionalities and ease of monetization, WordPress is taking home this trophy.
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open-source content management software/system. It is written in PHP; MySQL or MariaDB as its database system.
WordPress has a plugin architecture that welcomes development from millions of contributors and a template system that is often called a WordPress theme.
The variety of functional plugins and website templates make WordPress capable of developing any kind of website you can ever imagine.
Summary
To make the right decision, consider coding, programming frameworks and already existing content management systems.
Which of the independent tools or combination of software will be more effective for your sites?
Just as we have as the pattern for this communication, any answer that best fits your question should be more appraised.
As we proceed in this series, our intention will continue to hover on how you can create the most effective web pages for businesses, professional uses and lots more.
