What to consider before you choose a web development Agency

The world of web development remains considerably misunderstood. We've even heard people call it a "dark art". So once you need help turning your ideas and styles into a top quality website or web application, how does one know who you'll trust to urge this done?

The purpose of this post is to supply some key points on what makes an honest web development company, and can assist you understand the type of questions you ought to be asking development companies.

This is getting to be a really opinionated post and that we make no apologies for it. If you disagree with anything we are certainly open to discussing it further.

Now to get on with the post. Below are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and what you should be looking for in a web development company.

? Able to do both front-end and back-end development

? Donot specialize in one back-end technology

? Should follow best practices

? Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects

? Invests time in research and development

? Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests

? Easy to change

? Use source control

Able to do both front-end and back-end development

We don't subscribe to idea of developers that do front-end development and developers that do back-end development. That's the equivalent of getting a plumber who only fits pipes and leaves the fitting of the baths, showers, sinks and toilets to somebody else .

We agree there is a separation between web developers and web designers, there's a completely different thought process going on there, but the separation between front-end and back-end is just wrong. To be an honest web developer you would like to know the complete development cycle and to be ready to become involved within the project from start to end . There is also much to be learnt from the working with the varying technologies, but we'll come on to that.

Donot specialize in one back-end technology

There are variety of excellent back-end technologies that are appropriate for web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net and PHP (and others). They all have their strengths and weaknesses and not one is ideal . A good web development company should be flexible during which technologies they use, in order that they use the foremost appropriate one for his or her clients' needs.

The key reason we've hung out learning variety of technologies is to ready to pick and choose the bits we like. Over the years the developers involved within the League are ready to take the great parts of every technology and formulate variety of best practices and use them across all platforms.

Should follow best practices

The key to being an honest web developer isn't the technologies that you simply use, but the simplest practices that you simply follow. As technologies come and enter our in no time moving industry those best practices will remain, or a minimum of evolve. As a developer if you've got an honest grounding then you'll move with the days 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 repeatedly that web developers don't believe the marketing strategy of a project. This is generally because developers don't care. Well they should. How can they advise clients and believe helping clients produce the proper solution, if they are not brooding about the "bigger picture" (sorry, we all know it is a horrid phrase, we'll go wash our mouths out now). If a developer blindly does the work, they are not offering the client a service, they are just being a meat puppet.

The most important question a developer can ask is "Why?". Take time to know the client's requirements fully, and advise them, in any case the client doesn't understand the ins and outs of web development, you do. Make the event cycle a two way conversation.

Invests time in research and development

As everyone knows the online industry may be a in no time moving industry. Things come and enter the blink of an eye fixed fixed . an honest web development company gives it's developers allocated time hebdomadally to seem at new trends and technologies. Admittedly a number of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you will not know unless you check out them.

If you would like to understand if an internet development company knows there stuff, simply ask them what their developers are looking into recently. you do not need to understand everything you're told, note them down though and appearance them abreast of the web to know if the corporate are watching new trends or not.

R&D is perhaps the foremost important time hebdomadally for a developer. If developers don't evolve, the solutions they build will become stagnate and dated very quickly. As a client does one want an out of date solution before you even start?

Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests

Too often we've seen the client is that the tester for a project. If this is often happening, then, to place it bluntly, the event company don't understand your project tolerably , they're just "banging out" code.

Good web development company should be writing automated tests (integration tests, unit-tests etc) for all their code, both front-end and back-end. On an easy level, tests help developers to consider the code they're writing at that given time, they also help developers to write down more concise code. More concise code means the code base is simpler to know and cheaper to take care of .

The major benefit of a test suite to a client is that when changes are made to the code in the project there can be a lot more confidence in the fact that the change, or new code, hasn't broken anything else.

We are not saying automated testing is the silver bullet of web development, and tests are only effective if they are written well, but they certainly should be part of any web developers tool box.

Automated tests aren't the only important aspect of testing. The web development company should also have a level of human testing as well, and this is certainly something clients should be involved in. User stories are key to this process. As part of the development process, clients should work with the web development company to put together User stories, so that all parties involved understand how users will interact with the site or application and the results of those interactions.

Easy to change

We've all heard developers complaining how their clients' change the requirements of a project midway . Developers need to stop complaining about this, because this happens to us all and it's never going to change. A good web development company should have processes in place to cope with change. If you are a client, ask how change requests will be handled.

Web developers should work to short release cycles, preferably 1 - 2 weeks. The worst thing that can happen to a project is that the developers get the brief, start the work and then 2 months later they announce it's finished, only for the client to say "This isn't what I asked for!". By working to short release cycles, clients can be involved at all stages. At the end of each release the client should review the project so far and submit any change requests.

Use source control

My final recommendation is a pretty obvious and simple one, to most people, but we still speak to developers who don't use any form of source control. This seems more prevalent with freelancers as they don't see the need as they are the only ones working on the code. If that's how they see it, then they are missing the point.

There are lots of reasons why all code should be source controlled. We're are only going to mention a couple of key points here. Firstly it's a great way of keeping a log of changes made to code. (As long as developers put a comment into the commit). Secondly and most importantly is allows developers to change code without the fear of losing already work done. This is especially useful when trying out other possible coding solutions to a problem.

Dennis Ebisintei?has been working as a web developer for approximately 2 years now and has recently set up his own web development company.

He has worked for Shalom-tech innovation?and a few smaller marketing agencies.