Building a website seems daunting these days. There's more than just deciding on the who, what, when, where, and why when it comes to building your website. Your website could be there to drive customers to your business, it could be there to offer support to your existing customers, or it could be there to promote other supporting resources. It's not always a "buy my stuff" sort of deal.
The hardest thing to think about when building a website, today, is all the different ways a user might interact with your website. Did you know that NEARLY 90% of all internet traffic is from mobile devices? Here are some tips to think about when building your first website.
- Use a responsive design to ensure that the website looks good on all devices. Responsive design is a web development technique that makes a website adapt to the screen size and resolution of the device it is being viewed on, allowing for the best possible user experience on a wide range of devices including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It is achieved by using a combination of flexible grid-based layouts, images, and CSS media queries to adjust the presentation of a website. Hire a company that focuses on good design.
- Optimize images and other media for faster loading times. This means taking your images and putting them into a content management system that properly re-sizes them as appropriate for the user.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content and improve load times for users around the world. These days this is the standard for any website and is critical to ensuring your site works fast on mobile devices.
- Minimize the use of large libraries and frameworks to reduce the size of the website. Often when building a website your developers may include massive libraries that are never used on your site. Try to stick to simple libraries such as basic JQuery and standard Bootstrap.css.
- Use a version control system (such as Git) to keep track of changes to the website's code. Your developer should know how to do this as it is standard practice for any kind of internet development today.
- Use a CSS preprocessor (such as Sass or Less) to make CSS development more efficient. This can also help compress and minif your CSS.
- Use a task runner (such as Grunt or Gulp) to automate repetitive tasks.
- Test the website on multiple browsers and devices to ensure compatibility.
- Use a testing framework (such as Jest or Mocha) to automate testing of the website's code.
- Optimize the website's code for search engines (SEO).
These tips should make you think about how building websites has changed these days.
