Web development: do it yourself

Can I make my own website?

Many companies or people in Windsor who want a website commonly ask the question: "Can I develop my own website?" The short answer to this question is yes, absolutely. In fact, developing a simple website is easier now than ever. Programs like Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page have made it easy to develop web pages with little or no skill. Just choose a premade template, type in your text, add a couple of images and you're done! You have a website, right? Kind of.

The simple fact of the matter is that you can't expect to develop a professional looking, strictly coded website by simply connecting your text to a premade template with a code generation tool. Yes, the software has greatly improved over the years with the way it generates HTML, the markup code that defines the structure of your web pages, but the code generated will always be more bulky and less efficient than encoded HTML pages. manually.

Most professionals at Windsor develop their HTML pages by hand. In fact, most page developers rarely use more than just a text editor to generate their pages. Professional page developers will use HTML for what it was developed to describe the structure of a page and encapsulate the content of that page through the relevant markup tags for the content in question. What does all that jumbo mumbo mean? Simply put, it means that a professional web page developer will structure a page correctly, using the correct tags, not just using the tags that look good when a page is presented in the browser. A professional page developer never cares about how HTML makes a page look, HTML is there to structure a page, not to describe how style is defined. Cascading style sheets (CSS) describe what well-structured pages should look like when displayed in the browser. Furthermore, the developer structures its pages so that they are processed correctly in all browsers, a task that code generators fail miserably in most cases.

What is in the source of your page?

Well, I'll be the first to admit that most people don't care how bulky their web pages are or how inefficient they are coded. Okay, most visitors are on the high-speed Internet, and those extra 500 milliseconds your page takes to load aren't going to matter, are they? Again, more or less. You should always be aware of how long it takes for your pages to load and how responsive they are to your visitors. Studies have shown that an average user will wait about 10 seconds for a page to load before coming out of frustration. I have a feeling this study was done before the vast majority of users had high speed internet. I suspect that waiting tolerance is actually much lower.

Experienced web developers and web freelance designers will always optimize their images and HTML to load as quickly as possible. Images that are not properly compressed can easily be 5 times larger than a properly compressed image. Poorly compressed images can easily increase a web page load in 5-10 seconds!

Do you have Google?

One of the biggest drawbacks of doing your own web development is the lack of search engine optimization. One of the most common causes of poorly ranked websites in search engines is because the page is full of HTML errors that are removed by search engine crawlers. Websites that are not properly structured and have a lot of styling information in line with the content will never rank well compared to websites that are properly structured with clean and nice content.

So does this mean that if you make your own website, it will never appear in search engines? Of course not, but if a professional web designer or web developer schedules your HTML pages, your pages are much more likely to be indexed correctly. Also, most web developers will put a link from your well indexed site to your new site, which will further help crawlers to find your site faster. If your developer has a background in search engine optimization (SEO), that will further compare your chances with high search engine rankings.