Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, and social network services.

To make a cake you need some essential ingredients: flour, salt and eggs. In web development those ingredients are content: the text and images you wish to share and the overall message you want to pass along to your sites visitors. Before starting any web project you need to have as much of the content you want to use prepared beforehand.

Unfortunately to many developers come at this from the opposite end, trying to make the design and attempting to unconventionally add content into the structure after the fact. This is akin to planning a meal without having the right ingredients and then trying to add eggs and flour into a pan and hoping it will magically become a cake.

We have roughly 3 seconds by which to capture the attention of the site visitor and dazzle them and give them the information they need! Or you will lose them and they will never come back and even if they do they have already formed an opinion of you that will forever blemish any attempt at winning them over. Your visitors are coming to your site for content, not the design and building a website with little to no content or content that is poorly planned will result in something that may look good but will remain unappealing overall.

Today more and more freelancers are calling themselves web developers and web designers and the truth is all but a handful have any practical knowledge of what it really means to claim these titles. With the advent of popular web platforms like WordPress, Typo3, Concrete5 and Plone it is becoming increasingly easy for anyone to pickup a copy of these platforms, learn the basics and then run off, build themselves a website and start selling themselves as something they are not at all qualified to.

In my case I favor another popular platform called Joomla and the main reason I did not include it in the list above is not that it does not fit in that category but because it is far more complex than any of those solutions and not at all a favorite of the class of web developer/designer that just wants to hack their way through and fake it. I come from a very strict background of web development and learned the craft long before the term CMS (Content Management System) was even a word, let alone having access to these platforms to build database driven websites. Another favorite platform I use is called Magento and I use it exclusively for all my eCommerce websites due to the fact that there is no better solution.

I learned the basics of web design through trial and error and out of a pure passion for wanting to know how to create websites. At the time it did not even occur to me that I could do this as a profession and I did it purely as a weekend hobby and during times of the year when I was laid off from being a heavy equipment operator. If you want to know more about me I recommend reading my About Me page.