Web Development

Sections

Why a website?
Who is going to view the website? - Identify your audience.
What information is on the website? - Identify your content.
- Make an outline of the website content.
- How do you want the content organized? - Website sections and pages.
- How will a guest get to a specific webpage? - Website navigation.
Name for the website?
- Go to a domain seller like godaddy.com and search for available names.
- Make sure the name is simple, shorter is better. No crazy spelling or punctuation.
- You want a name you can end in .COM. .ORG works if you are making a website for a non-profit, but you will still want to lock down the .COM name too.
Look?
- What websites have a look you like?
- What websites do you like in the same industry or interest?
- Make a webpage layout - Think about what you want on the page.
- Make some boxes, representing content blocks, move them around till it looks right.
- Consider different screen sizes - small screens (phones) and large screens (monitors).

Keep file sizes small.
Only include necessary code and content.
For webpage peak performance include all code (layout, content, styles, functionality, etc.) with the delivered html file. Put CSS in the <head> section and Javascript just before the </html> tag. For this website I do this through PHP includes.

Previous direction was to use external files for CSS and Javascript. This is helpful for an organized development environment, different code in different folders and files. But every time the web browser needs to request a new file, there is some slow down to the user getting all the code the webpage needs. The current drive for peak performance is to put everything in the webpage html file. This is not difficult if you are using something like PHP or Node to process and deliver packaged html content.