5 things to watch out for when doing a new website.
9 May 2019
- Themes – pulling down themes, while cost effective and quick, can be dangerous. Unless they are super simple and don’t have a lot of plug-ins, you should avoid them. Heavy themes tend to have a lot of extraneous features that you will never use, and that can stress load times. Additionally as you add functionality or plug-ins, you risk creating conflicts that you may not even be able to find when your site goes down. When your CMS or Google or PHP does a new release, everyone of those plug-ins or snippets of code is at risk of breaking unless you have a 24-7 webmaster running your site.
- Fonts – seems simple but really it’s not. A lot of times you will get font rendering issues due to the variety of browsers and devices out there viewing your site. This could result in type breaking or wrapping oddly, making it a frustrating experience for the user. We recommend you choose fonts from fonts.google.com for your project.
- Image/Video Compression – a lot of sites surprisingly don’t use image or video compression or better yet a CDN (content delivery network) to manage the crunching of these files. This will result in higher first-byte times, which essentially means slower loading. You can also run your javascripts from CDN which will also help with this.
- HTTPS – Google’s recent updates with respect to location/mapping API’s etc., call for all sites to be running a SECURE site or those API’s will not work. Google will also boost SEO ranking as an incentive for making your site secure and will tag your site with a non-secure tag if you are not. This is just a good practice for anti-hacking as well as plenty of other benefits.
- Colors – another one that seems simple but is a bit more complex. Companies typically have PMS colors that they want to translate to the web, however just finding the #HEX equivalent isn’t enough. If you really want to make sure your colors translate to the web properly our advice is to try the color on different devices and browsers and find a color that you feel best translates across the board. You can bet that it may not be the original #HEX value that you thought it was.