Webupon

I am having five years experience in the field of web design, have designed web application for many clients from Sri Lanka and other countries as well. I have come up with a check list, which will speed up your web site development.

1. Define your scope before start anything. Scope should include the functionalities and the user interface features that you are going to have. Write down these in a blank sheet and keep with you. This will help to reduce the time of thinking after stating the development.

   Some of the features you could have are

• Ajax
  • Client validation
  • Server side validation
  • Navigation menu
2. Draft the design in a paper by using pen or pencil. Define the areas for the features you have. If you start your template design with your editor itself, it will confuse you and will cause to rework many things while designing rather if you have the design already in a paper you can simply follow it. We all have a hidden ability to make good design in paper than designing while sitting in front of computer. I am saying it from my experience.
3. Use div tags for designing your pages. Use of table will cause to delay in loading time of page since most of the browsers start showing the page after loading completely the content of the page. So try to use DIV tags. Tables are actually for displaying the tabular format data not for layout design. But if you are not familiar with layout design, doesn’t worry just proceed with table. But in that case, try to minimize the use of table, and completely avoid displaying multiple tables one inside another.
4. Use of css styles, are highly appreciated. It will help to have the styles in a center place, makes easy to change the color scheme as you like. Place the css styles in one file, and refer it to the pages in header tag. This will help to reduce the page loading time since most of the browsers cache the style sheets.
5. Always use the editor, which automatically generates the HTML source, while you design the page. Hand coding HTML is no need to be used in this era. Any how after completing the development, you can analyze the auto generated code and optimize for faster loading.
6. Most of the web developments now a day are having the need to communicate with databases. Use common class for database processing. This brings reusability and easiness for maintenance. If you are using ASP.net server side technology layered architecture is much preferred.
7. Many web sites provide templates for button and background images in Adobe Photoshop format for free. Download and customize them as you like and use. This will reduce the design time by half. Any how, it is better to have own graphics for other purposes for making your web site unique.
8. Don’t make much effort on graphic designs until you complete the functionality just use draft images with the same size
9. If you are using templates, that is fine, otherwise copy paste your pages and do necessary changes after that. Always use built in report generation features, which will help to save your time definitely. After generating the report automatically you can customize. So choose your editor which has those features. I am using Visual Studio which provides drag and drop report generation feature. Even Macromedia Dream weaver also provides the feature for PHP programming.
10. Don’t waste the time on thinking about technical approach for your implementation try to do a search on web first, web has almost everything available from the experts. If not there use one appropriate forum and put your questions there. You will get the answer within one day normally.

Hope you have got something.  I am expecting your comments, that will make me feel to do something more and to know what is missing.