Skills
A lot of the skills I’ve picked up over the passed years in website design and development has been from learning hands on. I’ve seen projects missing deadlines either because of the capabilities of developers or missed details and poor planning. Completing work on time really depends on the abilities to estimate the total duration from start to finish and then the capabilities of the designer or developer. I’ve drafted up proposals, flow charts, site maps, competitor research analysis, and many other tasks which require in launching a project into production. I am quite comfortable with jumping into a project from the beginning stages and take a project from beginning down to the last stages of production. Working solo or part of a team, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference for me, I can’t say I have a preference.
Website Development
Creating an online web application requires a lot of planning, not just programming skills. For example, an online admin panel I’ve programmed before gave agents the ability to list rental listings online. Sure you may think that you need a page to add a listing, edit, upload photos and perhaps a few other abilities. But going into development without a clear flowchart of how every feature and module will work together and spell disaster and code may need to be re-written again and again pushing back deadlines and cause other unexpected delays. I am quite handy with basic web applications that run on PHP & MySql as well as with the jQuery and Moo Tools JavaScript libraries. Developing a web application really requires to plan through all the features that are required describing and jotting down all the core functionality expected in the end product.
Website Ui Design
A website’s user interface is fully dependent on what I like to call, “the stuff”. Every website will have a target, either to provide a service, sell a product, present information on a topic, make an announcement, inform people about yourself or your business, create a forum that addresses a certain issue, or deliver news on a particular subject. The website’s user interface design will be constructed around the main purpose or target, if a website sells products then every component that goes with making an online shopping cart will need to be included in the original design. Other components can be videos, photos, podcasts, articles, login pages, product pages, signup offers and so fourth. Bad design happens when these elements have been completely skipped over and a designer is forced to come up with some kind of concept with zero input on a target goal.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I think that search engine optimization is quite easy, optimizing a website should really just come naturally. Yes, it is difficult to rank a website for certain terms and keywords when the website literally offers no information that pertains to those terms. Usually what ends up happening is that all the corporate lingo gets dumped into a design and then at the end, I hear, great lets get this ranked on Google’s first page. Even before a design or any kind of development occurs, there should be keyword research to identify what terms or keywords are going to be associated with the site at hand. After the terms have been found, researched and accepted they are grouped and content is usually created based on themes or sections of the website. When this is done, any additional inner linking and optimization becomes straight forward and simple.
Search Engine & Social Media Marketing
Search engine marketing is a bit more challenging and requires skill to be able to gain the desired online exposure. For example, a well crafted press release can cover quite a bit ground and reach distribution among quite a few online publishers thus gaining hundreds to thousands of back links from one press release. Viral videos like Bad Romance by Lady Gaga is a great example how a single video can capture 187,714,452 million views and counting. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and other social media sites can be used to launch a brand and leverage the online social media. Other forms of search engine marketing include article submission, press release distribution, news releases, PPC, CPC, banner ads, text link ads, blog reviews, directory submission, search engine submission, price comparison sites and others.
