What is Effective Web Development & How Can You Harness Its Power for Yourself?

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What is Effective Web Development & How Can You Harness Its Power for Yourself?

December 04, 2018

With the average small business only allotting $75,000 a year to digital marketing, it’s clear that budgets are tight, even in an era where the internet rules everything.

If you’re developing a web app, a new website, or a piece of software, you need to ensure that you’ve optimized your web development. Effective web development is when you’ve ensured all the moving parts are going to fit together before you write a single line of code.

Here are four ways for you to harness the power of effective web design.

1. Optimize Your Design

When you want to make the most of effective web development, you won’t be wasting time focusing on unproven strategies. In order for your team to be effective, focus on a design strategy that works. Utilize a simple F pattern for your web interfaces. Eye tracking and HCI researchers have found that people read a computer screen in an “F” pattern. They start at the upper left corner, read most of that column, and as they make their way down, they start to move less to the right.

In order to get the attention of your visitors and users, focus on giving the most information at the upper left-hand corner. Make that your main navigation area or where you put your brand name. This lets users know where they are and ensures they digest that information. Make scanning the interface natural for users so that they’ll be more engaged with it. The more time that you spend making your design user-friendly, the more time your users will spend with your design. Catch their eye and keep them interested by giving them something that they enjoy interacting with.

2. Set Your Roles

In order for you to ensure that your development process goes quickly, you need to have clearly defined roles. When you fail to assign roles, people will take the easy tasks and leave the difficult tasks for later. Assigning the work ahead of time ensures that everything will get done with a better level of accountability.

Assign a scrum master to head up daily five-minute scrum sessions. Around 10 every morning, you can get together and have a quick stand up meeting. Go over where you’re going today, any hurdles you’ve had, and problems you anticipate. Your team members will find ways to help one another out by stepping in and taking on challenging tasks.

When roles are set, it’s easy to measure your deadlines and the health of your project. If you know that the database is all set but the messaging system is in trouble, you can assign some of the workers from the database to help. Spread the workload around and help one another out.

Accountability isn’t important for making people feel guilty. It’s important to optimize development to ensure that everyone has the help they need to do the work they want to do.

3. Design Mobile First

If your web developers have ever tried to make a desktop site fit on mobile devices, they know the pain and sorrow of writing endless media queries. Writing line after line to try to make a complicated site fit on a small device is a real pain in the neck. This moves much faster if you start with a mobile-friendly design and then move to desktops and laptops.

As mobile browsing has definitively surpassed our expectations and the numbers racked up by desktops, we need to take it seriously. As more users will encounter your web design projects on their smartphones and tablets than on a computer screen, you need to accommodate them. Ignoring the growing mobile market comes at your own peril. The biggest challenge is ensuring that your design fits all the kinds of devices out there. When designing, don’t have one specific device in mind. You need to constantly test out your design and avoid exact pixel placements. Make sure images, media, and video are all resized to a basic minimum. Asking browsers to handle all the resizing on the fly will slow down your site. A slow site is a site that your users will surf away from.

4. Use Simple Grids and Stay Organized

If you want to get the most out of your design, follow some basic grid patterns. By making your layouts simple and standardized, you ensure that your viewers will get the design at first glance. Having a variety of nested grids and different patterns on each page of your site or app will cause users to feel confused and long for something simpler. Put your navigation in an easy to find area, accessible from any screen, no matter where you’ve scrolled or browsed to. It should be a small and standardized icon that people instantly recognize as symbolizing your menu or navigation.

Keep things simple and follow a three click rule. If there’s anything that takes three clicks or more to find, your site is probably too complicated. Strip things down for simplicity and put larger sections in subdomains. Make sure that the purpose of each of your pages is clear. For your web development to be effective, you need to be communicating clearly to your audience. They should know why they’re inside each page, and they should know what they hope to get out of it at first glance.

Web Development Is Your Key to Success

Where once the designers and engineers of a company were nested at the center of success for a company, now web development sits at that center. In-order for your web developers to get the most out of their work and for users to get the most out of your products, you need to optimize every step of the process. When you optimize your development, you cut costs, cut the time to market, and cut the number of complaints you’ll field from customers.

If you need to choose a company to help you with web development, check out our guide for tips.