The web designers and developers are quite different breeds.
What’s up guys. Carlton Stith here and I’m back to build a website! Welcome back to another post (Part 6, to be exact) in my web design and development process series. You could also call it a how to design a website series of posts because I am giving you the process that I use when designing and developing websites for my clients. If you haven’t done so already, I would advise you to get caught up by reading my previous posts where I talk about the discovery and design phases in my web design process. Now I am going to start talking about the development phase.
Focus on Writing Semantic Code
HTML5 and CSS3 are an awesome combination.
The focus here is writing clear, semantic HTML and commenting as necessary….trust me guys, you want to leave comments in your code. This is when your PSD mockup will help you (and the client) out tremendously. Having all of the aspects of the design laid out in a Photoshop file is very helpful. I will sometimes start off by design process using a framework. There are a great many to choose from out there and not each project is calls for one. As of late, I have been using Bootstrap. I would recommend setting up a template folder for all of the common structural elements of you code also.
…get some good Spanish coffee and get to work
I will then fire up the code editor of my choice, get some good Spanish coffee and get to work in Sublime Text 2 (as of recent). At this point in time is when I am ready to add all of the images, copy and other requirements. These should all be readily available from the client and stored in a file that is safe and easy to find. I would recommend creating a template for each page of the site. This way all of the pages that were requested by the client are laid out and all that I have to do is code each page accordingly.
XAMPP is a very easy to install Apache distribution for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows.
At this point, I am also doing a lot of preliminary link functionality testing in the browser or on a local server. If I am working on a project for a client in WordPress, just ask anyone and they will tell you that testing via a local server with Apache, MySQL and PHP installed (such as XAMPP) are an absolute must.
Firefox and Chrome are my browsers of choice. Safari has been having too many issues lately and IE needs to be buried in a coffin right next to Netscape. I have a handful of useful tools that I use for development. I may talk about these in a future blog post. What do you think? I would appreciate any feedback about if you guys would like to know what my favorite tools are at the moment.
Well folks, that’s all that I have for now. As always, feel free to leave a comment below, share this post with you friends and follow me on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re looking to hire a designer for your next project, click here to contact me. As always, thanks for reading and come back soon.
Until next time…Peace