Sir Tim Berners-Lee built the first website in 1990 and with it created an entirely new industry, information platform, and creative medium.
Since it’s humble beginnings, web development has transformed from a relatively simple task of publishing content—text and images—with relatively no interactivity, to a complex, dynamically-powered medium that supports many different layers technology that seems to be limitlessly expanding.
At it’s start it web development was simply creating and sharing static hypertext documents on the Internet, but those static documents quickly evolved into database-powered, user-generated, dynamic websites driven by content management systems (CMS) or built as stand-alone web applications. CMS are inherently web applications, but not all web applications are CMS. Take the Google search engine for example. It doesn’t manage content, it scrapes the Internet for content and allows people to use it’s web application to query against it’s index. On the other hand, a CMS is a web application that provides an interface to adding, editing, and manipulating content for a particular website or group of websites.
It’s difficult to judge the quality of how a website or web application is developed without looking the code that powers it. General users might have a sense of how well a website is built by how it looks, how quickly response times are, or how easy it is to use. However, many of those attributes could be due to different things entirely. Looks and ease of use can be attributed to the designer while speed may be due to the specifications of the web server and users network. High quality web development aims for these goals, but adds unit and integration tests, ensures high performance interaction and load times even on slow networks, and adds progressive enhancement for more capable devices to improve user experience.
Our Approach to Web Development
We take an integrated, test-driven approach to development and are constantly experimenting to leverage the newest web technologies available. Our specialities are centered around front-end web development, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript — as the user facing parts of a web application which tends to leave the biggest impression on how people judge a website or app. Technologies such as Node.js and Io.js, Ember, Grunt, Bower, jQuery, Yeoman, Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3, and SASS make our lives easier and our end products better.
Our development philosophy is to automate repetitive, trivial tasks wherever possible so we can concentrate on solving design problems. If you’re interested in learning more about our approach, please send us a message!