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Some of my views on the development process

Before contracting with me, I'm sure you want to know a bit about my professional process and workflow. My main focus is to use a holistic approach where design, development and branding work together to convey your message well to both your users and the search engine robots.

I am constantly reviewing this process, since it is the main reason I am able to craft websites at the quality level my clients have come to expect.


web development principles

Search Engine Optimization

google On a typical small business website, search engine optimization can mean the difference between 20 hits a day and 200. 70,000 visits a year is nothing to sneeze at, and ecommerce and larger scale websites have even more at stake.

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While it's easy to see the value of good SEO, getting there involves juggling both internal and external forces.

Internally, it is of utmost importance to optimize the site's overall architecture and corresponding link structure. Individual on-page content then needs to be optimized to reflect this structure. With a good, semantic-based architecture in place, relevant content will be highlighted easily and sensibly by Google.

Externally, good SEO is simple: you need to publish original, link-worthy content. When this is combined with a good internal structure and a little keyword research, viewers will be presented high-quality content every time they search for your topic, and the process will perpetuate itself.

Finally, after everything is in place, the last step is installing a high quality analytics package such as Google Analytics. With this data, you can track not only the quantity but the quality of your site's traffic. If people are leaving quickly from certain sections and staying in others, the site structure can be altered to better retain visitors. If people from a certain source don't convert (whether it be for a sale, a signup, an email address or whatever) your strategy can be further refined.

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Content

Each website is a unique project.  To make sure of this, I make content the driving force of all my websites.  This allows the design to fall nicely into place, and to accent rather than overshadow the content.  Displaying content to viewers is my primary concern.


Web Standards

w3.org Websites should look great and be completely functional regardless of the viewer's web browser or operating system. A good front-end is built on a foundation of web standards and advanced HTML/CSS techniques.

Find out more about web standards

The standards put forth by the W3C provide a set of rules to govern how HTML and CSS render in all browsers. Validating your website according to these standards ensures that it will look great both on older computers as well as any new web browser or operating system in the future.

But HTML validation is only the first step. No browsers adhere to the W3C standards perfectly, so it is important to have a deep understanding of both HTML/CSS and cross-browser development.

When building a new site, I am mostly concerned with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, since these browsers have over 98% of the market share. For IE7, FF2, FF3 and Safari, I develop the front-end to be perfect in both appearance and functionality. In IE6 there is sometimes a bit of graceful degradation, usually with full functionality and only a slight difference in design. Beyond these, the JavaScript and CSS are programmed to degrade gracefully into older and more quirky browsers.