Advice To New Website Developers

All professional web developers can tell you the main differences between coding in school and coding in a work environment.  Those differences are:

• Time is money
• Team work is important

In college, the only concept of time that a student understands is that they must meet the deadline. There are times when professors are lenient and may push these deadlines back. Also, most school projects are focused on solo work, and students strive to produce the end result.

The terms “readability” or “reusability” do not hold as much weight for students. However, in a professional environment, deadlines still exist, but developers tend to operate by project budget that the client has set. Time is not only the company’s money but also the clients. The more time you spend on a project, the greater the chance you have of going over budget.

There are also other factors that may come into play such as constant changes made by the client. As a web developer, that is something that you do not have control over. What you do have control over is your code. Both “readability” and “reusability” will help you save time and the client’s money.

• Readability – is important in the exchanging of code or when multiple people work on one code base. GitHub is a very useful tool to assist in projects with multiple minds working on it at once. If you do not use Git, then it is still important for you to understand why readability is so crucial. Learn more.
• Reusability – the most important benefit of reusability is that it saves time. If you take the time to write code with care, then when you happen to find yourself in a similar situation you can look in your archive of code and take that particular snippet of code. WordPress is a great tool that offers reusable components such as Divi’s. This replaces the need for hand coding and saves time on simple web page layouts. Learn more.

Especially when you work in a partnership or a team of developers, the code will be shared and critiqued. When a developer works on a particular website or project for a client, the code that they are working on is not for their eyes only. Often when they finish with some particular code, it is reviewed by the lead developer and incorporated into the rest of the project. Everything from format, naming conventions, and comments in the code become important to the end result.