Web Development Company Providing Custom Solutions

Platform of Choice Approach - Mobile First or Desktop First?

Most important thing before we write a single line of web code or even create a design part, is to figure out the platform approach – Mobile First or Desktop First. Even when we create responsive web applications (that run good on all screen sizes i.e mobile or desktop) it is still important to know which platform are we targeting first. Your layout, flow, iterations will first be setup according to that platform and then will be extrapolated for the other ones. Mobile first approach is pretty famous these days in case of B2C, but when it comes to creating a web app which is meant to generate large amount of content or for managing your organization the desktop can be the first priority too. Therefore, in this case, one size doesn’t fit all and its very important to know what user platform are we targeting first.

In case of Mobile First approach, we would want to have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that render in a blink of the eye, or also Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that can work as good as a native mobile applications if done correctly.

Mind you, the layout and flow can be modified for different platforms even when the web page is the same as you can call different layout and elements on run time, depending upon the browser and device your web is running upon.

Preparation, Architecture, Tech Stack identification

Unlike Mobile Apps, web apps development offers you to choose from a range of frameworks, Tech stack, libraries and also no-code or low-code frameworks. Depending upon the type of project, we can either go with a ready to use framework (Like Magento is the framework of choice when it comes down to creating Ecommerce Websites) or do a custom code or take a hybrid approach.

Some examples of Technologies according to type of a web app

Technology of Choice for Custom Functional Web Apps - React.js these days is the technology of choice to create interactive responsive web applications or “Functional web applications” (the web apps that don’t just offer you the information but also do a lot of functions like A Ticket booking website, or a Q&A website, or a video streaming site etc). We are using React.js with node.js or graphql in the backend with MongoDB or MEAN Stack (Angular as front-end language, MongoDB as DB, ExpressJS and Node.

And since it is a custom web application, it is important to identify the third-party libraries and services that you need to integrate your Web App with (like a payment gateway or an account authentication library or a SSN authentication library or a Medical EHR API) and the technology they support first.

We are using react even for creating the backend Admin panel and content management systems for our mobile applications. Also, using it for project that allows users to upload incident evidence videos and sell those in a legal marketplace. React is versatile, and comes up with many ready to use libraries like redux, vue.js etc.

Python can be a great choice too if you’re looking to create a fairly complex Web Application, an App that probably pulls the data from 10 different websites or APIs and does a lot of data processing before rendering it for the front-end user.

Before React and Angular, we heavily used Laravel to create very secure web applications and also help our clients to migrate their legacy apps onto the new technology and frameworks.

These are just some examples and yours can be a very different Web App than the examples quoted above, so contact us to discuss your project and we’ll identify the technology together.

Technology of Choice for Repeated Web Applications – As mentioned above, when it comes to creating Ecommerce Web Apps, you’ve frameworks like Magento or Woocomerce (if you love wordpress) and also Laravel.

Technology of Choice for Corporate Web Applications – You can use anything here, a simple HTML site can do wonder too if it is backed up by a great design and layout. However, CMS like Wordpress (Especially for blog), Drupel and also Wix can do good job here too.

Make Web Applications SEO Ready or SEO Oriented

If yours is a B2C Web Application, then it is absolutely important to make the Website in a way that it is SEO ready. Here are few pointers that can be considered while making a dynamic Web App SEO ready -

• Every dynamic page (created by the users like their profile page on a social app, or the content page they post) will have the right Page Title, H1 Tags, Alt Tags automatically created.
• Every static page shall have the right on page SEO done right at the time of coding.
• The URLs are not long or gibberish, instead of follow the globally accepted SEO standards (Ref this post from Hubspot)
• Every user generated content (pictures, images, videos, text pages) shall have automatically created Tags and keywords (if users permit you to push their content on the search engine).
• Every web page should render fast on both mobile and desktop browsers.
• The sitemap is dynamically created.
• Internal linking is made automatically for the content generated by the user or the Admin.

Consider creating PoC for the Web Development projects that heavily depend upon third party technologies

As the title suggests, if the project is not so regular type and is heavily dependent upon third party libraries or technologies (like an AI library, or a hardware API) and when we’ve not used that critical tech before, we insist on creating a proof of concept (PoC) first just to demonstrate the feasibility of the core functionality. Most of the times we do it for free (if PoC takes less than 40 hours) or charge very humbly in case it is a big PoC. We recently created a PoC of a crypto marketplace App which shows market data crunching data from various third-party APIs and it was done perfectly well and now the full project is on.

Another example of a recent PoC is when we created a Web App to fetch data from a Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) API aggregator. Now since Healthcare Data is ultimate secure, calling such APIs to fetch data and read and write is never a regular job and therefore you need to create a PoC.

Consider scaling the Web Application to a Full Mobile App in future

Every web app will have an equivalent or lesser equivalent Mobile App version today or tomorrow and vice versa. So whenever we are tasked to create a Web Application, we keep this in mind while creating the architecture that one day it will need to supply the iOS and Android Apps too. Therefore, while architecting the Database, Backend, Layout we keep that in mind and it saves a lot of time later on.

Using Scalable Infrastructure and things like CDN

In todays’ day and age, hosting web application on a cloud is a way to go. Cloud Platforms like Amazon web services, Google Cloud offer you a slew of services to choose from that help you Run, Enhance, Secure and scale your web applications easily. While using things like CDN (Content delivery network) will help you increase your website speed, delivery, and overall performance and user experience. A CDN also ensures that your website loads equally fast and good no matter which location it is being used.

Web Application Performance Optimization

Creating a web application that works is one thing, but creating a Web Application that works great is what a Web Development Company should strive for. Polishing a web app and keeping its performance high and optimized definitely takes additional time in web development process but it pays well, especially when you are going to compete in the B2C Web Apps market with all guns blazing. Here are few pointers that are to be taken care of in terms of Web Application performance and Optimization –

• Speed – As its name suggest, a web application should load fast – as fast as it can. We use AMP for faster rendering on mobile devices, while size optimized content (images, videos etc) for light weight loading. Also, using CDN as mentioned above. Tools like Pagespeed helps you to continuously check your website’s speed and performance.
• Optimized HTTP requests or API calls, so that your website doesn’t unnecessary call the data and keeps user in waiting.
• Uptime Monitoring and keeping backup – Various free and paid tools are available to monitor your website’s uptime 24*7, so exploit those for good.
• Optimize Images/ User generated content (Videos, pictures, gif’s etc) – The lighter the content, the faster the rendering, simple as that.
• Get rid of redundant plugins and code files – Cutting extra fat is always beneficial.
• Take care of 404 Errors, avoid redirections, and solve canonical issues – Ofcourse, these help increase both user experience as well as keep search engine crawlers happy.
• Checking of Web Font performance.

Prioritize Website and Backend Security

The websites are more prone to hacking and security threats Vs Mobile Applications. Folling are few pointers that are basic in order to secure your web application –

• Secure Database against SQL Injection.
• Use right passwords, keep your authentication system intelligent and don’t leave the passwords like “Admin123” and allow hackers to come inside.
• Keep sensitive data (like user details, financial data, account numbers etc) hidden.
• Use only tried and tested components, plugins or third-party services. You won’t know what vulnerability is being left inside a component so use only the ones you trust the most.
• Keep regular data backup, and do regular security checks.
• Use cloud providers data backup and security services.