The A-to-Z of Web Development

Posted on 08. Jan, 2010 by Suraj in Internet Marketing, SEO, Website Design

My very good friend Lee Rickler of Point and Stare who specialises in web development, in particular WordPress development wrote the “A-to-Z of Web Development” which really demonstrates his expertise of all things web dev. Everything listed is a technique and/or tool that Lee and his web development company employ when working for their clients.

Some of Lee’s clients include Apple, Microsoft, Canon & Nokia – i’m not just name-dropping but that tells you how good this guy is at what he does. Lee has kindly allowed me to re-publish his article here for the Internet Marketing Highway readers and will be providing more articles for us as a guest author.

Point and Stare specialise in WordPress development in London and I highly recommend visiting their website to have a look at the rest of Lee’s work.

A – Accessibility
This needs to be built in from the off, giving functionality and benefit to as wide an audience as possible.

B – Brand guidelines
Adherence to these promotes good front-end structure and balance throughout.

C – CSS
A Cascading Style Sheet is used to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

D – Doctype
A declaration at the start of an XML document that identifies the root element and DTD of a document. Essentially this tells the browser how to render the page content.

E – Elastic interface
An elastic interface scales with browser text size (default is usually 16px) by using em values for all elements.

F – Formats
Ensure all files are produced and named correctly. Best practice is to use all lower case and no spaces.

G – GIF
Extensively used format best used for displaying images primarily comprised of solid areas of colour.

H – HTML
HTML elements are the basic components for HTML markup. Validating HTML is produced by Point and Stare on all projects.

I – Internet Explorer
The browser from Microsoft. The devil. The one that gives most development companies the shivers. On every project we test across all major browsers and OS.

J – JavaScript
JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the web and can be used, as an element of AJAX, to add motion, dynamics and depth to a website.

K – Keywords
Keywords are essential within the main content to define the message as well as meta information used by some search engines.

L – Layout
Proportional, liquid and hybrid layout are also referred to as dynamic design. Many units of measure exist with the most popular being pixel, em and percentage.

M – Metadata
Metadata is included in the page header allowing for the inclusion of elements such as simple descriptive text, dates or keywords.

N – Naming conventions
Name files with relevance and consistency. latest_news_button.gif is more screen reader and SEO friendly than Untitled 24.gif

O – Open source
We strongly believe in both producing and using open source code allowing others to share our knowledge and saving clients time and money.

P – Pixels v Points
A Pixel is a single dot on the computer screen offering significant design control whereas a Point corresponded to a physical size of printed text on paper.

Q – Query String
A query string is the part of a URL that contains data to be passed to the web applications. Where possible we use URL encoding to turn these strings into English.

R – RSS
An RSS feed can benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically and also benefit readers who want to subscribe to up-to-the-minute information.

S – Socialising
Using social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc are paramount to achieving maximum reach for your information or content.

T – Tips and Tricks
Learning new tips and tricks helps keep our minds active and your projects fresh. Learn something new everyday.

U – Usability
The elegance and clarity with which users interact with a website. For obvious reasons, high on our list of priorities.

V – Validation
All Point and Stare projects go through stringent tests to ensure W3C validation specification compliance.

W – W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in October, 1994 to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards.

X – XHTML
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a family of XML markup languages that extend HTML, the language in which web pages are written. The essential difference between XHTML and HTML is that XHTML must be well-formed, while HTML need not be.

Y – Yahoo! Site Explorer
A service provided by Yahoo! which allows viewing of information on websites in Yahoo!’s search index. Yahoo! validation keys are just one standard SEO element included in all projects.

Z – z-index
z-index is a CSS property that sets the stack order of specific elements. This allows elements to be overlaid on top of each other giving a faux 3d effect.

Tags: css, elastic interface, gif, javascript, pixels, rss, w3c, web development, xhtml, z-index