Website Development

There are many ways to develop a website that all lead to the same visual result. We look at a design and consider multiple requirements in addition to the visual design, as we make development choices for each web page. 

Page Load Speed

A website page should display quickly. This is not only the result of fast website hosting (learn more on our website hosting page), but also efficient and clean coding.

Website coding languages such as HTML and CSS have evolved dramatically over the years. Features which once required custom code can now be implemented in a much simpler way. This generally leads to a faster page display, and certainly reduces our development time/cost to you. This is also why we also suggest re-developing a website periodically to refresh the code (it's usually a good time to refresh the design too).

Search Engine ranking (a focus of SEO) considers the speed of website response. A slower, or intermittently slower, site can be ranked lower than a faster site.

Page Maintainability

Website pages should be easy to maintain after your new site is live. All websites created by Shore FX sit on top of a "foundation" called a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS gives you the ability to easily add, delete and edit website pages when you wish, with no specialized coding knowledge. The CMS is accessed with credentials and a web browser. From a phone, tablet or laptop. A CMS also makes that same process easier for us, if you decide to ask us to do that for you.

There are many choices "behind the scenes" within the CMS. We create flexible solutions that are re-useable for new or re-designed pages in the future. CMS modules are chosen to make adding new content as simple and intuitive as possible. We try to anticipate how you might want to use the website in the future - things you may not have thought of yet.

Search Engine Friendly

Search engines look at the code of a web page, not the visual rendering of the page that a human sees. When we develop a new web page we consider this as we make coding choices. Search engines look for clues within the page to indicate hierarchy of text content, such as heading levels (H1, H2 etc). Images can have alternate text to help search engines understand what they show. These and other page development choices represent basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that help organic search engine ranking.

Security

All modern web browsers warn visitors if a website is not secure (URL starts with https). A secure website ensures information traveling between your web browser and the website host is encrypted. Search Engines now rank secure websites higher than non-secure websites. So this is now a basic SEO technique.

If you have a form which collects personal information (PII, HIPAA or payment), security is essential. If your website page displays sensitive information of any kind to your visitors, security is essential.

Shore FX implements all websites on Shore FX hosting servers. Shore FX hosting includes an SSL certificate and the necessary website configuration to make the https website a default.

Mobile Friendly

More and more people are finding websites from mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Some business to consumer (B2C) sites are almost exclusively found through mobile devices. From a development perspective this means we are essentially developing and testing 8 websites in 1. We target 4 device types; phone, tablet, laptop and large (UHD) screens. For each there are two orientations; landscape and portrait. We develop websites which are responsive to the device and automatically change how they look depending on the visitor's device.

If a potential website visitor uses a search engine on a mobile device to find a website, it will rank mobile friendly websites above non-mobile friendly websites; Being mobile friendly is now an SEO required feature for all modern development. This is often why older websites should be considered for re-development even if the design still meets your needs.

Accessibility

Local governments may require your new website to be accessible. Even if their is no legal requirement in your region, it is excellent practice to consider all of your website visitors and ensure equal access. Shore FX has experience with design and development necessary to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.