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A-Z of Web DevelopmentMy 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.

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