In 1994 we lost Kurt Cobain and got the world wide web as a weird consolation prize. In the years that followed, if you’d asked me if I knew how to build a website I’d have said yes, I know HTML, so I know how to build a website. If you’d then asked me what it takes to build a website, I’d have had to admit that HTML would hardly feature.

Among the design nerdery and dev geekery it’s easy to think that the nuts and bolts of building a page just need to be multiplied up and Ta-da! There’s your website. That can certainly be true with weekend projects and hackery for fun. It works for throwing something together on GitHub or experimenting with ideas on your personal site. But what about working professionally on client projects?

The web is important, so we need to build it right.

It’s 2015 – your job involves people paying you money for building websites. What does it take to build a website and to do it right? What practices should we adopt to make really great, successful and professional web projects in 2015? I put that question to some friends and 24 ways authors to see what they thought.

Getting the tech right

Inevitably, it all starts with the technology. We work in a technical medium, after all. From Notepad and WinFTP through to continuous integration and deployment – how do you build sites?

Create a stable development environment

There’s little more likely to send a web developer into a wild panic and a client into a wild rage than making a new site live and things just not working. That’s why it’s important to have realistic development and staging environments that mimic the live server as closely as possible.

Are you in the habit of developing new sites right on the client’s server? Or maybe in a subfolder on your local machine? It’s time to reconsider.

Charlie Perrins writes:

Don’t work on a live server – this feels like one of those gear-changing moments for a developer’s growth. Build something that works just as well locally on your own machine as it does on a live server, and capture the differences in the code between the local and live version in a single config file. Ultimately, if you can get all the differences between environments down to a config level then you’ll be in a really good position to automate the deployment process at some point in the future.

Anything that creates a significant difference between the development and the live environments has the potential to cause problems you won’t know about until the site goes live – and at that point the problems are very public and very embarrassing, not to mention unprofessional.

A reasonable solution is to use a tool like MAMP PRO which enables you to set up an individual local website for each project you work on. Importantly, individual sites give you both consistency of paths between development and live, but also the ability to configure server options (like PHP versions and configuration, for example) to match the live site.

Better yet is to use a virtual machine, managed with a tool such as Vagrant. If you’re interested in learning more about that, we have an article on that subject later in the series.

Use source control

Trent Walton writes:

We use source control, and it’s become the centerpiece for how we handle collaboration, enhancements, and issues. It drives our process.

I’m hoping by now that you’re either using source control for all your work, or feeling a nagging guilt that you should be. Be it Git, Mercurial, Subversion (name your poison), a revision control system enables you to keep track of changes, revert anything that breaks, and keep rolling backups of your project.

The benefits only start there, and Charlie Perrins recommends using source control “not just as a personal backup of your code, but as a way to play nicely with other developers.“

Noting the benefits when collaborating with other developers, he adds:

Graduating from being the sole architect of your codebase to contributing to a shared codebase is a huge leap for a developer. Perhaps a practical way for people who tend to work on their own to do that would be to submit a pull request or a patch to an open source project or plugin.”

Richard Rutter of Clearleft sees clear advantages for the client, too. He recommends using source control “preferably in some sort of collaborative environment that you can open up or hand over to the client” – a feature found with hosted services such as GitHub.

If you’d like to hone your Git skills, Emma Jane Westby wrote Git for Grown-ups in last year’s 24 ways.

Don’t repeat, automate!

Tim Kadlec is a big proponent of automating your build process:

I’ve been hammering that home to every client I’ve had this year. It’s amazing how many companies don’t really have a formal build/deployment process in place. So many issues on the web (performance, accessibility, etc.) can be greatly improved just by having a layer of automation involved. For example, graphic editing software spits out ridiculously bloated images. Very frequently, that’s what ends up getting put on a site. If you have a build process, you can have the compression automated and start seeing immediate gains for no effort. On a recent project, they were able to shave around 1.5MB from their site weight simply by automating compression.

Once you have your code in source control, some of that automation can be made easier. Brian Suda writes:

We have a few bash scripts that run on git commit: they compile the less, jslint and remove white-space, basically the 3 Cs, Compress, Concatenate, Combine. This is now part of our workflow without even realising it.

One great way to get started with a build process is to use a tool like Grunt, and a great way to get started with Grunt is to read Chris Coyier’s Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard.

Tim reinforces:

Issues like [image compression] — or simple accessibility issues like alt tags on images — should never be able to hit a live server. If you can detect it, you can automate it. And if you can automate it, you can free up time for designers and developers to focus on more challenging — and interesting — problems.

A clear call to arms to tighten up and formalise development and deployment practices. The less that has to be done manually or is susceptible to change, the less that can go wrong when a site is built and deployed. Any procedures that are automated are no longer dependant on a single person’s knowledge, making it easier to build your team or just cope when someone important is out of the office or leaves.

If you’re interested in kicking the FTP habit and automating your site deployments, we have an article later in the series just for you.

Build systems, not sites

One big theme arising this year was that of building websites as systems, not as individual pages.

Brad Frost:

For me, teams making websites in 2015 shouldn’t be working on just-another-redesign redesign. People are realizing that in order to make stable, future-friendly, scalable, extensible web experiences they’re going to need to think more systematically. That means crafting deliberate and thoughtful design systems. That means establishing front-end style guides. That means killing the out-dated, siloed, assembly-line waterfall process and getting cross-disciplinary teams working together in meaningful ways. That means treating development as design. That means treating performance as design. That means taking the time out of the day to establish the big picture, rather than aimlessly crawling along quarter by quarter.

Designer and developer Jina Bolton also advocates the use of style guides, and recommends making the guide a project deliverable:

Consider adding on a style guide/UI library to your project as a deliverable for maintainability and thinking through all UI elements and components.

Val Head agrees: “build and maintain a style guide for each project” she wrote. On the subject of approaching a redesign, she added:

A UI inventory goes a long way to helping get your head around what a design system needs in the early stages of a redesign project.

So what about that old chestnut, responsive web design? Should we be making sites responsive by default? How about mobile first?

Richard Rutter:

Think mobile first unless you have a very good reason not to. Remember to take the client with you on this principle, otherwise it won’t work as a convincing piece of design.

Trent Walton adds:

The more you can test and sort of skew your perception for what is typical on the web, the better. 4k displays hooked up to 100Mbps connections can make one extremely unsympathetic.

The value of testing with real devices is something Ruth John appreciates. She wrote:

I still have my own small device lab at home, even though I work permanently for a well-established company (which has a LOT of devices at its disposal) – it just means I can get a good overview of how things are looking during development.

And speaking of systems, Mark Norman Francis recommends the use of measuring tools to aid the design process; “[U]se analytics and make decisions from actual data” he suggests, rather than relying totally on intuition.

Tim Kadlec adds a word on performance planning:

I think having a performance budget in place should now be a given on any project. We’ve proven pretty conclusively through a hundred and one case studies that performance matters. And over the last year or so, we’ve really seen a lot of great tools emerge to help track and enforce performance budgets. There’s not really a good excuse for not using one any more.

It’s clear that in the four years since Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article the diversity of screen sizes, network connection speeds and input methods has only increased. New web projects should presume visitors will be using anything from a watch up to a big screen desktop display, and from being offline, through to GPRS, 3G and fast broadband.

Will it take more time to design and build for those constraints? Yes, it most likely will. If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask to be your default browser, you can be brave enough to tell your client they need to build responsively.

Working collaboratively

A big part of delivering a successful website project is how we work together, both as a design team and a wider project team with the client.

Val Head recommends an open line of communication:

Keep conversations going. With clients, with teammates. Talking is so important with the way we work now. A good team conversation place, like Slack, is slowly becoming invaluable for me too.

Ruth John agrees:

We’ve recently opened up our lines of communication by using Slack. It has transformed the way we work. We’re easily more productive and collaborative on projects, as well as making it a lot easier for us all to work remotely (including freelancers).

She goes on to point out how tools can be combined to ease team communication without adding further complications:

We have a private GitHub organisation (which everyone who works with us is granted access to), which not only holds all our project code but also a team wiki. This has lots of information to get you set up within the team, as well as coding guidelines and best practices and other admin info, like contact numbers/emails for the team.

Small-A agile is also the theme of the day, with Mark Norman Francis suggesting an approach of “small iterations with constant feedback around individual features, not spec-it-all-first”. He also encourages you to review as you go, at each stage of the project:

Always reflect on what went well and what went badly, and how you can learn from that, even if not Doing Agile™. Ultimately “best practices” should come from learning lessons (both good and bad).

Richard Rutter echoes this, warning against working in isolation from the client for too long:

Avoid big reveals. Your engagement with the client should be participatory. In business no one likes surprises.

This experience rings true for Ruth John who recommends involving real users in the feedback loop, not just the client:

We also try and get feedback on what we’re building as soon and as often as we can with our stakeholders/clients and real users.

We should also remember that our role is to serve the client’s needs, not just bill them for whatever we can. Brian Suda adds:

Don’t sell clients on things they don’t need. We can spout a lot of jargon and scare clients into thinking you are a god. We can do things few can now, but you can’t rip people off because they are unknowledgeable.

But do clients know what they’re getting, even when they see it? Trent Walton has an interesting take:

We focus on prototypes over image-based comps at all costs, especially when meetings are involved. It’s much easier to assess a prototype, and too often with image-based comps, discussions devolve into how something might feel when actually live, or how a layout could change to fit a given viewport.

Val Head also likes to get work into the browser:

Sketch design ideas with any software you like, but get to the browser as soon as possible.

Beyond your immediate team, Emma Jane Westby has advice for looking further afield:

Invest time into building relationships within your (technical) community. You never know when you might be able to lend a hand; or benefit from someone who’s able to lend theirs.

And when things don’t go according to plan, Brian Suda has the following advice:

If something doesn’t work out, be professional and don’t burn bridges. It will always come back to you.

The best work comes from working collaboratively, not just as a team within an agency or department, but with the client and stakeholders too. If doing your job and chucking it over the fence ever worked, it certainly doesn’t fly any more. You can work in isolation, but doing really great work requires collaboration.

The business end

When you’re building sites professionally, every team member has to think about the business aspects. Estimating time, setting billing rates, and establishing deliverables are all part of the job.

In 2008, Andrew Clarke gave us the Contract Killer sample contract we could use to establish a working agreement for a web design project. Richard Rutter agrees that contracts are still an essential part of business:

They are there for both parties’ protection. Make sure you know what will happen if you decide you don’t want to work with the client any more (it happens) and, of course, what circumstances mean they can stop taking your services.

Having a contract is one thing, but does it adequately protect both you and the client? Emma Jane Westby adds:

Find a good IP lawyer/legal counsel. I routinely had an IP lawyer read all of my contracts to find loopholes I wouldn’t have noticed. I didn’t always change the contract, but at least I knew what might come back to bite me.

So, you have a contract in place, and know what the project is. Brian Suda recommends keeping track of time and making sure you bill fairly for the hours the project costs you:

If I go to a meeting and they are 15 minutes late, the billing clock has already started. They can’t expect me to be in the 1h meeting and not bill for the extra 15–30 minutes they wasted. It goes both ways too. You need to do your best to respect their deadlines and time frame – this is always hard to get right.

As ever, it’s good business to do good business. Perhaps we can at last shed the old image of web designers being snowboarding layabouts and demonstrate to clients that we care as much about conducting professional business as they do.

Time to review

It’s a lot to take in. Some of these ideas and practices will be familiar, others new and yet to be evaluated. The web moves at a fast pace, and we need to be constantly reexamining our tools, techniques and working practices. The most important thing is not to blindly adopt any and all suggestions, but to carefully look at what the benefits might be and decide how they apply to your work.

Could you benefit from more formalised development and deployment procedures? Would your design projects run more smoothly and have a longer maintainable life if you approached the solution as a componentised system rather than a series of pages? Are your teams structured in a way that enables the most fluid communication, or are there changes you could make? Are your billing procedures and business agreements serving you and your clients in the best way possible?

The new year is a good time to look at your working practices and see what can be improved, and maybe this time next year you’ll look back and think “thank goodness we don’t work like that any more”.