Building quality public-facing websites

I’m busy adding two very simple screens to our website and feel anxious about how long the work is taking. That got me thinking about what kinds of things you need to consider when you’re building top quality public-facing websites.

All of these things need to be considered (which is why it feels like the development work is taking “too long”):

• Architecture — balancing YAGNI, DRY, flexibility, robustness and performance. All these these principles push against one another, and it takes time and experience to produce code that strikes the right balance.
• Pages must be according to the designs, “pixel-perfect” ideally.
• Subtle animations to be added to enhance the user experience.
• Pages must be responsive and scale nicely on different browser sizes (and devices).
• Cross browser compatibility must be considered. Which browsers to support officially? Which ones to not “officially” support, but still keep in mind?
• Errors must be handled, especially around API calls.
• Field validation must be done.
• Security must be kept in mind (protect against XSS, XSRF, npm/nuget security vulnerabilities etc)
• Logging must be done, especially server-side, to help debug issues when they arise in production.
• Unit tests, integration tests and UI tests must be written (and stay “green”).
• Code, HTML and CSS must be clean, maintainable and done according to standards.
• Analytics must be added (eg. Google Analytics) so that the business knows how the pages are being used by users and if the feature really adds value.

That’s a lot! And I probably forgot some things. But this is a good checklist of things to consider if you’re building a website and want it to be top-notch.

Also, be kind to your developers, they’ve got a lot on their plates (see above).