Design NewsDevelopment is an all-encapsulating word that is essential to understanding how to improve your website’s user experience. Often I see web design shops that offer great design services and maybe a small collection of select module installation and theming services, such as WordPress or Joomla installations. It’s just not enough.
Offering development is the difference between buying a cheeseburger at some nameless McRestaurant or slapping a half pound of fresh ground chuck on the grill with your own seasonings. Sometimes the available offerings are “good enough,” but this is your website we’re talking about. Why settle?
So now that you’re drooling, what exactly is development? Development embodies code written by a developer (typically a web programmer) that will add dynamic functionality to your site. Anytime you see text on a page that changes based on who’s logged in or what time of day it is, you’re typically looking at the handiwork of a web programmer. The interesting thing about development is that, if it’s done correctly, it shouldn’t be terribly obvious that a programmer has been there. A good website never spits out errors at you or has a dreaded PHP “white screen of death.” So you may ask yourself: “I just want a simple 5 page website, why would I need or even want development?”
That’s a difficult question to answer in a generic case, yet answers are all around. Development can be as simple as a custom RSS feed on your website to a full-blown custom shopping cart. One of the most common requests we get for development is a “Contact Us” form with a captcha. That doesn’t seem like it would require a developer, would it? I know designers who can do that. What if you want to allow users to upload a word document or PDF file and send it along as well? What if you want to have a dropdown where, depending on what they selected, the email goes to a different person? These are all things a good web developer can do that you simply can’t get from a “copy and paste this code to your site” solution. Yet if you didn’t know the option was available, you’d probably have all the emails go to one central place, and forward them yourself to the appropriate person.
Your website should work for you, not the other way around. If your website is creating more tasks for you to do manually, then you’re not asking the right questions. Why process credit cards manually when you can have a website do it 24 hours a day? Why go with a boxed theme for your WordPress blog when you can make it look and feel exactly like your website? Why create a sidebar where you have to manually change the article entries every few days so it looks fresh instead of having an RSS feed rotator automatically pulling down the latest content?
If you’re looking at a new website or an update to an existing site to bring it up to 2011, you need to be asking yourself what custom development can do for your time and your business. After all, your business is more unique than a module with some color or font changes, right? Let your website be uniquely tailored to your business, not everyone else’s.
