CMI Web Studio

There are so many frameworks in web development that, to be frank, most developers find it confusing at times. Many developers are jumping around from one to another, if for no other reason, to add it to their resume. This article is designed to help cut through the confusion, and the bias online, and provide some thoughts that will help in your decisions.

This is a basic list of things to consider when choosing a framework:

1. Who’s behind the framework? Is it backed and endorsed by a large company, or perhaps a small group of developers looking to make a name, or otherwise just a new company looking to emerge? This should be very important in making a decision with not only the current framework you use with your projects, but even deeper, the platform and technology direction overall.

2. Is the code constantly being updated, tested, and maintained by a large professional team of developers? Technology changes, and so should the frameworks you use. It’s a constant pursuit to improve and debug that requires a lot of resources and man hours.

3. The code base should be of the highest quality, fully standardized and professional coding practices that will stand the test of time. It’s not about being a perfectionist, but it is about creating real solutions with solid products that have a reasonable life cycle.

4. A framework is only as good as it’s documentation and support. If it’s not easy to use, if it’s doesn’t produce better products, if it’s not speeding the time of development, then there is no point at all in even attempting to use it. This happens from great efforts to clearly document and to demonstrate common scenarios with written and video tutorials, etc.

5. What kind of work do you want? Do you want to work with professional organizations and long term contract work or jump from client to client with short turn around low level work? You must choose the technology path that meets your goals, and just the same, the framework goes nearly hand in hand with that direction.

Now that we know how you should choose, let’s look at the current options:

Tier 1:
Microsoft – .NET
JAVA – JSF

Tier 1 options are driven by large commercial for-profit companies with a large number of developers supporting and maintaining them, a large amount of money backing them, and are solid “enterprise worthy” directions. As a result, they are found as your tier 1 options.

Tier 2:
JAVA – Struts
JAVA – Spring
PHP – Zend Framework
Python – Django

Tier 2 options are also driven by quality companies with a large number of developers supporting them, and are solid directions that are considered “enterprise worthy” in many cases. Django may be a surprise by some, however, Python has proven to be a force to reckon with in the development community, and Django has played a large part in that movement. The other options in this tier should be no surprise.

Tier 3:
Ruby – Rails
PHP – Yii
PHP – Symfony
PHP – CodeIgniter

Tier 3 options are solid options, however, they are for the most part community driven by a smaller group of developers. Tier 3 options tend to be popular for a few years, then lose traction. They are also prone to complete overhauls where the framework is built again from the ground up to address issues and poor long term vision, which may break functionality of existing projects.

Tier 4:
If you’re not in the first 3 tiers, one should question whether you’re willing to roll the dice on such a development path for your projects. Sure, anyone can build their own framework, and many of the tier 4 and lower options are just not stable enough to guarantee their future.

Some may agree with the assessments, and of course, some will not as their favorite framework falls lower on the scale then expected. However, the vast majority of non-biased software/web/mobile architects will agree with these findings. With that said, there is no “wrong” framework to use provided it eases your development process, but if you’re looking for career paths and long term life cycles, you should consider these 5 points.

Google says our servers deliver our developed websites 91% faster than the rest of the websites on the web. What does your development and hosting company do for you?

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1. Track Record – Choose a company that has an established track record. Generally a web company that has more than 15+ websites that they have designed or developed in-house with case studies to show their achievements. Any qualifications or awards won will also help establish this.

2. Methodology – Ensure your chosen company has a strong web development methodology or process. This means that when your chosen company develops your website you can track the progress of your project and ensure all key quality standards are covered.

3. Usability – Design does play a heavy role in the development of your web project. Ensure the company you choose has strong visitor usability and user-friendly interaction knowledge. Usability is how visitors will interact with your website and how effectively they reach your end goal.

4. Development Team – The company you choose should have an in-house development team. Don’t use a company that is going to send your project work off to another country or other out-sourced web companies. You don’t want to be chasing an invisible rabbit down a hole should things be affected by an unforeseen event.

5. Design Team – Your web company ideally should have an in-house design team, unless you are dealing with another individual or company for design. This tip relates to tip 3, if your web company has a designer in-house this will better the success of the project as the development will mirror the design better and its objectives.

6. SEO – Choose a web development company that has an understanding of search engine optimization. Another important factor to any web projects success is making sure the company you deal with knows about SEO and how it will affect your website.

7. Social Media – Social media is a new form of marketing and can drive great results. Dealing with a web developer that understands this can help you drive better traffic and alternative forms of login.This tip applies to socially active websites and e-commerce based projects.

8. Content – Content is the biggest thing that pushes your website and draws in your visitors.
Content will be the main thing that will sell your services or product, the company you deal with should have good development techniques to structure content effectively.

9. E-commerce – Choose a web development company that has e-commerce experience. E-commerce is fast becoming the biggest way to make money online, how your customers make payments is very important. Make sure you deal with a development company that can recommend and implement the best payment methods available.

10. Support – The most important tip to date, your development company must be able to support you as a customer and provide ongoing maintenance and service.

One of the biggest misconceptions about designers (and usually Web designers) is that we’re just Web designers — that the scope of our skills begins with Lorem ipsum and ends with HTML emails. This is ridiculous.

Everyone in this industry fills dozens of roles throughout a given day. On a call with a prospective client, we take the role of salesperson. After the contract is sorted, we become researchers, combing through the client’s outdated website, looking at analytics and identifying breakdowns and room for improvement. Soon after, we become content curators, wading through the piles of content in PDF format sent by the client, identifying what works and what doesn’t.

Then we’re architects, laying out content to get the most important messages across, while ensuring that everything in our layouts remains findable. We design the website itself. We manage client expectations and work through revisions. We write code. We introduce a content management system. We carefully insert and style content. We create and update the brand’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We help to create an editorial calendar to keep content fresh and accurate. We check in on the analytics and metrics to see how the website is performing.

Notice that “design” is mentioned only once in all of that work.