Web Development

If you intend to run an online business, there are a few things you should know about web development.

The majority of web designers are not computer programmers, some are not even designers. Most will sell you a ready made website and do little more then configure it for you. These sites never really rank well or convert customers to sales. You may save a few dollars by getting an off the shelf website but may well pay for it many times over in lost sales.

I would like to explain a few concepts to you briefly and how they affect your website and business.

Bespoke

What mean by bespoke? Bespoke is a often misused term. In the context used on this web site we are talking about the building of your web site from the database design all the way to the front end is custom designed and built, not just the visual front end. A true bespoke website is built from the ground up to requirements.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are a way of marking up content so that search engines can recognize your content for what it is. It enables you to identify entities as objects that can be understood by search engines.

Imagine a webpage about a product, how does a search engine understand that a peace of text is the name of the product, that an image is in fact a image of that product, that a number on the page is the price of that product? To a search engines these are all bits of unrelated content but with rich snippets you can tie these things together to show search engines that they are in fact properties of a product object.

There are many objects, such as a person, an organization, an article, an address there is a comprehensive set of rich snippets that your web site needs to be marked up with. Will your website be marked up with the full range of rich snippets? Many web developers offer a token implementation of rich snippets tacked onto a CMS website, you need to make sure that your website is marked up from being to end with rich snippets. If you want your website to be part of search in the future you need a bespoke website marked up with rich snippets.

n-Tier

For a website to be n-Tier it must have more then 2-tier, very few do. With a 2-tier site you have the website talking directly to the to the database, this leads to performance and scalability issues, and is a maintenance nightmare. We build only n-tier sites Here is what Microsoft says about 2-tier sites.

A two-tier application is appropriate for a small application that does not have a lot of forms, or perhaps no forms at all. It may also be appropriate for prototypes where the final version of the application uses one of the other n-tier techniques described in this article. A two-tier application is not well suited, however, to an enterprise environment, because development and maintenance time and costs can become unmanageable.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973829.aspx

Scalable

A scalable site has the ability to perform much the same way no matter how much data it accesses or how many users are using it. It is said if you come across a tortoise on a fence post, the chances are it did not get their by accident, likewise a scalable site does not happen by chance. It takes in-depth knowledge and very careful thought throughout development.

Concurrency

By nature websites are multi-user. There are many problems that have been identified that can and do occur in a multi-user environment. Double booking, for an example, it is easy to imagine how someone could open a page and see that a hotel room is available for booking, while the user is pondering wether he should book, some one else could open the same page and book before the first user submits his form. What happens next? You could imagine someone changing the price of the booking while the user is pondering, what price will the user pay, will he be informed of the change?

Transactions

Most business transactions result in changes to records in a database, some times many changes to many tables. So what happens if one table is changed and then for whatever reason the other tables are not changed, an error occurs, there is a power failure and all changes are not completed. The database would have lost its integrity. How is integrity returned to the database? We roll back all transactions that are not completed without error.

These are some of the questions you need to ask before getting a business website developed. We at ThatsIT Solutions have these answers and incorporate them into every site we build.