The world of web development is still very much misunderstood. We've even heard people call it a "dark art". So, when you need help turning your ideas and designs into a high-quality website or web application, how do you know who you can trust to get this done?

Now to get on with the post. Below are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and what you should be looking for in a web development company.

  • Able to do both front-end and back-end development
  • Don't specialize in one back-end technology
  • Should follow best practices
  • Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects
  • Invests time in research and development

Able to do both front-end and back-end development

We agree there is a separation between web developers and web designers, there's a completely different thought process going on there, but the separation between front-end and back-end is just wrong. To be a good web developer you need to understand the full development cycle and be able to get involved in the project from start to finish. There is also much to be learned from working with the varying technologies, but we'll come on to that. Web Development Write For Us Blog is a fantastic method to share your knowledge and experience.

Don't specialize in one back-end technology

There are a number of good back-end technologies that are appropriate for web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net, and PHP (and others). They all have their strengths and weaknesses and not one is perfect. A good web development company should be flexible in which technologies they use, so that they use the most appropriate one for their clients' needs.

Should follow best practices

The key to being a good web developer is not the technologies that you use, but the best practices that you follow. As technologies come and go in our very fast-moving industry those best practices will remain or at least evolve. As a developer if you have a good grounding then you can move with the times and technologies fairly easily.

So, what are these best practices that we are talking about? Below are some of the key ones we follow.

·        Writing semantic HTML

·        Follow web standards for all front-end coding

·        Automated testing of both front-end and back-end code

·        Use of an MVC framework

Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects

We've heard this complaint many times that web developers don't think about the marketing strategy of a project. This is generally because developers don't care. Well, they should. How can they advise clients and think about helping clients produce the right solution if they aren't thinking about the "bigger picture" (sorry, we know it's a horrid phrase, we'll go wash our mouths out now)? If a developer blindly does the work, they are not offering the client a service, they are just being a meat puppet.

Invests time in research and development

As everyone knows the web industry is a very fast-moving industry. Things come and go in the blink of an eye. A good web development company gives its developers allocated time each week to look at new trends and technologies. Admittedly some of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you won't know unless you look into them.