Developing web applications has advanced from static HTML pages to complete dynamic, complex business applications since the World Wide Web was first conceptualized in 1990.
There are thousands of digital and printed resources available today that describe step-by-step how to develop any web application. Many of the errors that early developers frequently made can now be caught and fixed by development environments.
Different platforms can also be used to develop highly interactive applications from static HTML pages. These patterns, practices, and platforms are all common to all web development, and their inherent nature makes them vulnerable to a wide array of web development issues.
To provide you with some of the commonly made web development mistakes so you can learn how to avoid them in the future and become an even better developer, we have created this list of web development tips.
Growing requires that not everything be perfect. You may have heard me mention this previously. A website’s final look is just as important as enjoying the process and learning along the way. To get your business off the ground, the most vital thing you can do is get started!
The following are some common mistakes in web development.
1. Not ready for scaling
Companies today aim to have their MVPs (minimum viable products) out in the market as quickly as possible, especially in the world of high-speed development, startup accelerators, and instant global reach of great ideas. Despite these issues, even the best web development teams overlook pertinent information under constant time pressure.
It is common for teams to take scaling for granted. This is a great concept, but it is prone to problems if you push it too far. It is not good enough just to select a scalable database and web server and separate all application layers on scalable independent servers.
To avoid rewriting a considerable part of your application later, which becomes a major web development issue, you must think about many details.
As an example, suppose you upload profile pictures to your website directly. Putting files directly in the application was an excellent choice- files came with fast access, file handling is a feature of each development platform. These files could even be served as static content and minimize your application’s load time.
2. Utilizing bandwidth inefficiently
A local network environment is typically used for development and testing. In your development environment, you might not be able to identify an issue with1Gbit connection speed if you download five background images, each weighing 3MB or more.
You should prepare yourself for many complaints and problems when users start downloading 15MB home pages over 3G networks on their smartphones.
There are a few tricks that you can use to optimize your bandwidth usage and gain a surge in performance. Most web developers do a few basic web development practices, including:
- JavaScript minification
- CSS minification
- Compression of HTTP on the server
- Resolution and size optimization of images
3. Request handlers consume time or processor resources
Sending emails based on user actions is an example of this mistake. Developers often believe that email should be sent from the user request handler via an SMTP calls.
For example, let’s say you plan to create an online book store that will handle hundreds of orders each day. Each time a user posts an order, you send a confirmation email as part of your order intake process.
It will work at first, but what will happen when thousands of requests send confirmation emails suddenly flood your system? The application either timeouts, your quota has been exceeded, or it takes longer to respond because it handles emails instead of users.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Errors
Web admins believe they are SEO experts and that it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort. In reality, SEO best practices are complex. Become an SEO master by educating yourself on Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s latest changes to their web indexing algorithms. You are not a specialist in SEO unless you constantly experiment and have data tracking + analysis.
Additionally, Search Engine Optimization is often viewed as a last-minute activity. Web development issues come with this. Content optimization, tags, keywords, meta-data, alt tags, a site map, and other aspects of SEO are not the only aspects of SEO.
Other aspects include eliminating duplicate content, making crawlers easy to crawl the website, achieving efficient load times, and incorporating intelligent backlinks.
5. Taking no account of different screen sizes
Recent years have seen a surge in interest in responsive design. New ways of accessing online content have been introduced by the proliferation of smartphones with varying screen resolutions, creating a host of new web development issues.
Smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly popular as ways of visiting websites. The accessibility of website content must be seamless across all types of devices to ensure seamless navigation.
It is possible to build responsive web applications according to many patterns and practices. Some frameworks are platform-independent, while others have tips and tricks unique to their development platform.
Probably Twitter Bootstrap is the most popular. Each major development platform offers this free, open-source HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework. You will easily build functional responsive web applications by following Bootstrap patterns and practices.
Wrapping Up
Developing a website, a web service, or a web application is a broad term that encompasses many different tasks. You should always always be cautious when it comes to scalability, authentication, and authorization – or be prepared for many problems in web development. Hopefully, this guide inspired you always to be careful.