It is no longer sufficient to be a web designer.

The web and its demands on the site owner, you, have grown exponentially in the past 5 years. Gone are the days where you have a website consisting strictly of static HTML pages, designed in Photoshop, sliced up into neat images and placed in tables and uploaded via FrontPage to the web.

Today, you have so many more considerations in order to make your site successful. You must be found in the search engines, ergo your site must be built with proper SEO in mind. You need to be able to edit your own site quickly and easily. Blogs, eCommerce, news publishing, comments by users, "sharing" (i.e. via digg, del.icio.us.com, and other social bookmarking sites), you want to provide RSS feeds (a way for your clients to be able to subscribe to syndicated news from your site) and more.

Most websites are driven by databases now, rather than static HTML. The HTML only provides the framework, and either PHP or ASP or some other scripting language pulls your content from a database to display on your site. It's complicated.

The upshot?  You need a web developer, not just a designer.

Design is important, obviously. You must have a professional site in order to reflect the level of quality of your business. But your site needs to be built upon an infrastructure of proper code that will withstand and grow with the changes that happen every day. 

Naturally, CJT Digital Design would love for you to hire us for your web development needs. But even if you don't, here is some information that you can use when you are searching for a web developer, to make certain that he/she is thoroughly conversant in the aspects of development that will allow you to maximize the value of your site.

Code Validation: Any developer worth his asking price should be familiar with the process of validating code. All code should be validated with the World-Wide-Web Consortium (www.w3.org) to make certain that your code is clean. This assures proper functioning of the site both with browsers, and search engines.

Cross Browser Review: A cross-browser review should be extensively undertaken before launch; testing using Internet Explorer, Mac, Firefox, Netscape, and so on are done throughout the design & build process to make certain your site looks the same to any user.

Search Engine Optimization: (“SEO”) The site should be designed to make it easy and efficient for Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others to crawl your site and index all of your pages. SEO is important because the “bots” that crawl your site from the search engines must be able to penetrate to the fullest extent possible, from the home page through the contact page. Making certain that links are valid, code is clean, pages are lightweight, sitemaps are included, Flash elements are kept to a minimum, all ensure that the site is crawlable, and thus thoroughly indexed by the search engines. 

Monitor resolution review: Websites are viewed by people with monitors anywhere from 800 x 600 pixels to 1600 x 1200 pixels: (Fig 2) Your site should be viewed on all possibly monitor resolutions during the development process to make sure that everyone, from the smallest to the largest, has an easy and pleasant viewing experience.

All of the above are done so as to provide a very solid foundation upon which to build, and if needed, expand your site well into the future.

This is really just the beginning of the examination of Design vs. Development. As I stated at the outset, it's no longer sufficient to be a web designer. To prepare any website to properly survive in the highly competitive environment known as the world wide web, you must be prepared to be a developer whose knowledge and experience runs very deep. Stand by for part II - "Questions to Ask your Web Design Company"...