My Web Development Philosophy Keep it as simple as possible.

It’s easy to become very overwhelmed when planning and developing a new website. I know—I’ve been there countless times myself!

When looking at each individual component of a successful website—things like graphical look and feel, effective written copy, programming, search optimization, web hosting, and so on—it’s no wonder that putting together a complete website design from start to finish can become extremely complex.

That’s where my "Keep It Simple!" philosophy to web development comes from.

Start with the basics. Instead of jumping right in and beginning to build a new website, it’s important to consider what the final goal of the site will be. It’s amazing how many businesses and organizations fall into the trap of "I just need a website and I need it now," only to find that they really had no clear vision of what it was supposed to accomplish at all.

What will your site accomplish?

• Is the goal to attract organic search traffic and convert visitors to leads or customers?
• Are you simply looking to put forth a simple brochure-type site to appear when someone searches for your business name directly?
• Are you planning to sell directly on your site, perhaps with an e-commerce enabled online store?
• Should your site be information-oriented or centered around driving sales?

It all depends on your unique goals and objectives. But one thing remains true regardless...in order to achieve them with your new website, you’ll need to have a clear picture of exactly what your website should do before trying to build it.

Do you really need a fully hand-coded website? The answer is probably not. In fact, for most small to mid-sized organizations and businesses, using open-source software like WordPress to power your website and enable it to be operated as a CMS (stands for Content Management System) is clearly the way to go. After all, why re-invent the wheel?

Think about it this way...if you were to go out and purchase a new computer, would you expect to have some kind of pre-installed operating system on that computer to make it all work or would you want to write all or the software code from scratch and in order to make your very own operating system? It’s easy to say that most of us would opt for a pre-existing operating system.

Well, the same goes for the web. Building a new website from scratch, one snippet of code at a time, is just fine if you want to do all of that work or pay for it to be done. But thankfully, for the rest of us looking for a simpler solution without trying to re-invent the wheel, there are software options like WordPress that have taken the leg work out of from-scratch web development.

Wrapping it up, my web development philosophy in a nutshell looks like this:

• Identify all of the objectives first.
• Decide on the simplest, cleanest solution possible to achieve results.
• Use existing quality tools and software whenever and wherever possible.

By following this process every time, much of the confusion and complexity is eliminated from the web development process. And you can’t beat that!