Are You Rolling With The Right Development Team?  
December 17, 2009

Your organization has decided that it's time for a strong web presence, and indeed that is a wise decision. Considering the global market of today, and the elimination of geographical boundaries and time constraints that the web affords, it makes absolutely no business sense at all to not be on the web. However, just the choice to have a website isn't in and of itself enough to begin taking full advantage of all that Internet has to offer. These days just about anyone who can edit a Myspace page can also "build" a website. So how do you know you've chosen a developer or development team that's going to help you reach your organization's goals of being on the web in the first place?

For the past year, the talk has been a tough economy this, and the bad economy that. Everyone is looking to cut costs, especially business organizations. But you need to consider that some areas are not to be cheaped down upon, and web development is one of those areas. Now if you're able to find someone who can cook up a snazzy and functional site for you at little or no cost at all, you've struck gold. This simply isn't the case for most organizations however.

You're going to find yourself looking quite silly if you choose a development team that isn't up to speed with the latest web practices and development tricks. The same is true with graphic designing aspects. Your website's layout is going to look highly subpar and so will your business or organization if you delegate the task of web design to your wife's cousin, or an associate in your accounting department - simply because the know a smidgeon of HTML and it'll cost you little or nothing. Besides the visual aspect of your website, there are numerous technical considerations, such as SEO, web standards, and site security (to name a few) that you will definitely want to trust to an individual or firm that specializes in these areas.

To avoid looking like a company that isn't web-savvy, or down-right silly, get with a developer who knows that you shouldn't have ISP-based or "free" E-mail addresses listed as ways to contact your organization from your website when you have your own domain. Consider how lame it would look if on this site - 3dotmedia.com - we had our E-mail addresses as 3dotmedia@gmail.com or 3dotmedia@neo.rr.com. No way! The correct way is how you currently see it on this site: jwhite@3dotmedia.com, zmillin@3dotmedia.com, the3@3dotmedia.com, etc. Use YOUR DOMAIN AS YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS!

With the case of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, how many times have you taken a look at someone's source code for their website and you see nothing in place for keywords and other metatags? It's ridiculous, especially for business-driven websites. Any web developer worth a hill of beans will have some form of SEO in place - even if it is just a simple foundation of keywords and meta-descriptions in place for you to extensibly build upon later in the future.

The point is that there is much more to web development than just simply desiging a website. Yes, as earlier elaborated upon, you do want a developer that can themself design - or has a team in place to - and establish a visually appealing website, but you also want to ensure that they are in tune with what's going on with the web as far as standards, security, and accessibility is concerned.