What’s the difference between a designer and a developer? A lot of people assume that these terms are synonymous, but they are increasingly found on different teams in large organizations. There are other roles in the software development space that are also needed to ensure that the finished product is reliable and usable.
(more…)Category: Web Development
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Your Virtual Store Front
Imagine you’re walking down a street, looking in the windows of all the stores. Some are exciting and make you want to go in. Some tell a story of what you might find inside the store. Some are dusty and neglected. Some have not changed their display for so long that the sunlight has bleached out the products and made the book covers curl up like dried leaves. Some of them make you laugh, some are gimmicky and cheesy, some make you smile, and some even make you think.
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Tools for Developers
These are some of the tools that I use all the time during development.
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Responsive Websites
A responsive website is one that you can view equally well on a mobile or desktop device. The font size and layout should be readable without zooming, panning, or scrolling horizontally.
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Styling your Website
Since the invention of the web, styling on websites has improved in leaps and bounds. You can have gradients, rounded corners, overlapping elements, drop-shadow, scalable and responsive content, and much more. This is all made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
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Agile Methodologies
The key benefit of agile approaches to software development is being able to respond to changing customer requirements and feedback from user testing. It also means that you can roll out a system that meets the basic requirements and then refine it incrementally over time.
The most well-known agile methodology is Scrum, but other systems exist, including Kanban, Smart/ADP, Scrum-ban, and Agile Unified Process. In this article, I will compare the different methodologies.
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Migrating to TypeScript
When a company hires a new developer, it can take up to six months for them to get fully up to speed on the company’s codebase.
One way to make this process less painful for the developer, and less expensive for the company, is to use a strongly-typed language like TypeScript.
A product manager commented to me that he had noticed that developing with TypeScript is faster.
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Accessibility
Making websites accessible is a very important aspect of user experience. Accessibility benefits everyone, because it makes websites easier for everyone to use. It is also a legal requirement in most countries, including Canada.
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User Experience
User experience is an important aspect of website design. Remember the bad old days of the 1990s, with marquees, animated graphics everywhere, an excess of links that were just labelled “click here”, and garish background colours?
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Localization
When you’re building a website which will be viewed by people from different cultures and countries, it is important to build it so that it can be easily and efficiently translated into different languages (internationalization), and then to provide versions of the content that are optimized for the relevant country and culture (localization).
Website localization is more than translating the website into the target language; it is important to take the local culture and economy into account as well. This involves user and market research in the target country.
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