7 Things Good Web Development Will Get You That An Amateur Can’t Deliver

Category: Blog

Written by Matthew Millet

Before you decide that your nephew can solve your business' web solutions with Microsoft Front Page, give some serious thought to what separates professional web development from amateur sites.

1. Design Perfection

It is an expectation in the web development industry that a web page will look exactly like the web design down to the last pixel. That may seem unlikely or surprising, but as a web developer I will take screenshots of the design I'm turning into a web page and measure every angle, border, and font to the exact size right down to a single pixel. This is not only what's expected, but demanded of a professional web developer.

I shudder when I see large companies with broken web sites. I'm sure we can all relate to the unpleasant experience of seeing text overflow the box it was supposed to be in, or links overlap each other when we’re considering giving our money to a company. What you are telling your clients when they see those things is that you are not a serious business. You may think it odd that a developer is expected to be pixel perfect, but believe me when I say your visitors don’t want to see a single mistake when considering to give you their business or personal information.

2. Cross-Browser Support

You can count on a professional to make a web site work well in all browsers on all operating systems. A web developer has to extensively test all of his final products in all major browsers, and many will even check them on those same browsers in other operating systems if what they've developed is that critical.

If you're paying a friend or relative the cash in your wallet to put your company's face on the internet in front of millions, you probably aren't paying for the time that accurate testing demands.

3. Conversions

It may seem strange that a business will spend thousands of dollars on something as seemingly trivial as design, but the subtleties of a good web site design can be a powerful thing. The first message your web site is going to send is going to be the design of your front page. The human mind reacts to colors and visuals before it can manage to read even the title of your home page. It will affect the opinions your potential customers have of your company, particularly in comparison to your competitors.

It’s not just that web design is an art, it’s a careful science. Every color put on a web site is carefully measured using tools that ensure it is within a certain range of the colors scheme to be easiest and most appealing to the eyes. Placement and size of navigation links are kept within specific constraints that have been proven to draw the attention of web surfers. A website must be carefully balanced between attractiveness and usability, because if either one suffered because of the other your web site may be doing more harm than good.

4. Scalability

A good web developer will leave understandable code that can be easily updated and altered by other developers. This is something you will never get from Front Page or other programs that make the code for you. I have seen far too many businesses neglect this, and they have all come to regret it. As a rule of thumb, you will need to make updates to the site. I’ve never seen an exception to that, even among the most simple web pages. If your website needs some new features the damage bad code can do to your wallet is almost certainly going to be more than what it would have cost to do it well in the first place.

Beyond that are the more complicated choices of frameworks, database schema, and platforms that no amateur is going to understand. It’s easy to make a web site poorly, it takes years of school and training to make simple web sites well.

5. Reliability

A good developer will know how to keep your visitors happy as they navigate your site. The little things in a web site are what take the most time. Making sure that popups look well every time they’re clicked, ensuring that the site doesn’t stall when the user clicks on everything before it finishes loading, making sure that your videos will work for everyone, and preventing all of the annoying things that web sites do to make us angry while we’re trying to get what we want out of them.

Bugs will happen. More than any other fact about development, this is true. A professional is going to know where they might be, how to find them, and how to make the web site handle them when they do happen. If your web site was made professionally, most of your users will never see anything go wrong. This takes time. More time than making it in the first place. You can’t expect to have your web site work like it’s professional if you don’t pay for a professional.

6. Mobile Support

Many people still don’t realize it, but a mobile version is must-do for web sites. If you are going to have a web site, it speaks poorly of you if it doesn’t look good in your visitor’s phones. The way things are going, this is going to become more and more severe. It’s not unlikely that most of your visitors will be using a mobile device.

Mobile design is a field of web design unto itself. You can’t just make the pages thinner and call the job done. If you want your web site to tell your visitors that you are the company for them, your mobile site has to be designed and developed just as carefully as the rest of your web solutions. Good web development will make your mobile visitors experience at your site unique and seamless, and both are vital to the wary consumers that the digital age has created.

7. Visitor Satisfaction

Ever had to retype an entire form because you didn’t enter a field you shouldn’t have needed to enter in the first place? Ever clicked the border of a link 5 times until you noticed you had to click on the text? These things will make your customers angry, and angry people will want something to blame. That is going to be your company if your web site gives them an unsatisfactory experience. There are countless best practices and tricks that a trained web developer keeps under his hat that you’re not going to get from a developer using HTML For Dummies as a reference work. Web forms, pop ups, and web media are delicate arts that the experience of a web visitor hinges upon.

Large development companies can charge hundreds of dollars an hour.

This is necessary if, and only if, you need a lot of special attention and custom work. If a site that does everything your website needs to do can be found on Google in 10 seconds, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars, but many people will try to get you to do just that.

If you need a special web application, or you have a ground breaking idea, you’ll be spending some cash and doing a lot of research. There’s no way around that. But for the rest of us there’s a better way. There are many cheap services that will streamline the process for you. Reusing tried and tested methods to ensure that your product is robust, reliable, and just plain all around awesome. Lexy Sites from VivaNet 2.0 offer an all-around web solution for businesses on a budget, with little risk. There are no contracts or setup fees, and an obligation free trial is available from their web site.

It can be a daunting challenge to wade into the jungle of web development with a strict budget and a tight schedule, but as strongly as I advise the small business to shy away from expensive custom design and development, nothing’s worse for a company’s web image than a web site that parties like it’s 1999.