Web Development
Websites
Web Applications
Nowadays, having a business without having a website is like going for a job search without a good resume ready. It has become essential for a business to have a presentable marketing website. Your potential customers will definitely search you on the web and expect a good website before entrusting you or your product.
Even though a website seems like an easy thing to make on the surface, there are many intricacies in its development, which if not understood, your business website and thus your business will be at a disadvantage.
In this blogpost, we will cover essential technical building blocks required to develop a full-fledged effective business website. New startup founders and business owners can understand these building blocks to better make correct decisions for their business website.
A Domain name is like an address of your physical office on the Internet. The domain name is what people will associate first with your website and visit to see all your business offers. A domain name has to be leased on a one or more year basis from any registered Domain Registrars. These domain registrar has authority to lock the domain name for your business so that once leased, the domain name cannot be used by anyone else.
A domain name consists of two main parts - the personalized name and a top level domain name like .com, .net, .org, .in etc. .com being most commonly used by profit oriented businesses.
Some popular domain name registrars are GoDaddy, Namecheap, AWS, Google etc.
Leasing a domain name just locks the domain so that others can’t lease it. But, nothing yet can be done with it yet. To make sure that your domain name works, you need to set up a DNS Service.
A DNS service is a service on the Internet whose job is to return the active IP address of the website which is hosted using the domain name. It essentially links the domain name to an IP address. For example, whenever you type a domain name into a browser, the browser tries to find out the active IP address corresponding to the domain name by requesting domain name servers using the DNS service.
Since, DNS service works like a database which needs compute power to work, this service often costs extra and can have different tiers based on how much traffic you expect into your website. Most of the DNS registrars also provided a default DNS service. But, you are free to purchase Domain from one company and use DNS service from another company.
A website frontend is the set of HTML, CSS, Javascript code and any other files like images that are required to render your website’s content, look and feel. HTML helps with rendering and showing content of the website, CSS for styling of the same HTML content so that it looks good, and Javascript to make the content dynamic if necessary to respond to events like button clicks on your website.
Whenever a user types the domain name of the website, the browser gets the IP address from the DNS service, then requests IP address for these frontend files and renders them on the browser window after receiving these files. Every website needs to have a frontend, without which a browser won’t be able to show any meaningful information to the user.
You will need to develop these front end files to show your website’s content, and also need to set up a server with a public IP address which can respond with these files whenever they are requested. The information about this server’s IP address has to also be communicated to the DNS service, so that the service can store this ip address in its database.
The server is generally a software installed in a machine which has a static public ip address attached to it. Popular examples are Nginx installed in a virtual server, Wordpress website, or any static site hosting service like AWS S3, Github pages, Netlify etc.
A Website’s frontend files can only show static content. You can show information like, your company's service offerings, your contact information, about your company etc. But all this information will be static. To change this information, the frontend code will have to be modified and files updated in the server again and again.
To add dynamic features into your website like selling a product directly by taking payment, having the customer fill a contact form for you to reach out to them, or showing on a website constantly changing information, you will need to set up a server which hosts some kind of database or connects to a Content Management system.
This server works similarly to the frontend server, but instead of just responding with code files like HTML and Images, this server has to be complex enough to be able to run code inside it. The code which runs inside this server is called the backend code whose responsibility is to run a custom logic to retrieve dynamic data whenever requested. This backend code often has the logic to retrieve the necessary dynamic data by connecting to a database.
The code which facilitates this connection between frontend and backend is termed as Application programming Interfaces (APIs). It is necessary to build APIs to retrieve correct dynamic data and perform operations on data stored in databases. These APIs are then invoked through usage of frontend files.
Today, it has become a defacto standard on the Internet to make websites https only. If your website does not follow HTTPs browsers warn the users that the website is not secure and this could prevent people from visiting your website altogether.
To enable HTTPs, you need to generate a SSL/TLS certificate and install it on your server. This TLS certificate is generated by certificate providers which first checks if you really own the domain of the website and after verification provide you the certificate to add to your server. When you use this certificate, you are telling the world that you are truly the right owner of your website and all the data passed between your website visitor and your server is encrypted over the Internet.
Many DNS providers also provide a service of generating TLS certificates at an extra fee or sometimes even for free. Some popular sources of generating and managing TLS certificates are Lets Encrypt, Namecheap, AWS Certificate Manager and many more.
Even if you create a beautiful website, with functional dynamic features, you won’t know how well your website is performing without adding some kind of analytics feature to your marketing website.
Setting up Website Analytics helps to assess how many people are visiting your websites daily, what website pages they are visiting most, how are they interacting with the website, how much time are they spending, what geographic location they are coming from, etc. This analytics information can help you assess strengths and weaknesses of your website so that you can take necessary steps to improve the website for better engagement from customers and thus improving your sales.
The logic for website analytics is mostly present in the frontend code as Javascript code which gets run whenever some analytics event of interest happens on your website like visiting a particular page or clicking on Contact Now button.
Instead of developing this website analytics code yourselves it is often better to rely on third party solutions which specialize in this. Most popular being Google Analytics. Some other alternatives include Plausible, Semrush, Umami etc each focusing on some special benefits like being open source, specializing in SEO, Privacy focused etc
SEO - Search Engine Optimization refers to the techniques used to make your website optimized to be better searchable for search engines. The better SEO your website has the higher the probability that it will come up higher on search engine results when people search your website.
Even though SEO is a highly subjective field and difficult to master, there are some common ToDos which you can ensure so that SEO is at least not bad. Some important points are: Each website page should have appropriate title and description Important website details like business services, important offers, contact information etc are directly present in the form of html, easily parsable by search engines The website page load is speed is as fast as possible Ensure your website has sitemap.xml and robots.txt files with correct information. These are referred first by search engine indexers Make sure your website has a favicon icon with correct dimensions. Some information about this can be found here. Setup open-graph images, title and description for your website and important pages Ensure that your website is reactive to different screen sizes and mobile friendly There are tools like ……. where you can assess your website’s basic SEO functionalities.
The frontend server and the backend server are situated in one geographic location. Therefore, whenever a request comes to your server the request goes straight all the way to your server in a specific geographic location through the Internet.
Because of this, when your business website is to be visited by customers all over the world, the customers who are far away from your server’s geographic location will face higher latencies compared to customers closer to your location. This will degrade the website performance affecting SEO as well as dissatisfied customers due to your slow website.
Therefore, nowadays it is considered best practice to always set up a CDN (Content Delivery Network) on top of your website server, especially the front end of the website.
The CDN helps in caching the static front end files in geographic locations all around the world. Because of this when a customer requests your frontend files they are fetched from CDNs geographically closer location instead directly from your server which is far away resulting in better and consistent performance of your website for your worldwide visitors.
Popular CDNs with generous free tiers include AWS cloudfront and Cloudflare. You can also set up more than one CDNs for your website.
CI/CD which stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, refers to automated procedures (code to be run) set up so that a website or a web app be developed, tested, and deployed into production in a seamless and automated manner.
If your website is very simple and it is being changed very infrequently, CI/CD is not that important and deployment done manually can be enough. But, if your website is complex and many developers are developing and changing your website front end or backend code, then having a CI/CD Pipeline built is of utmost importance.
Building a CI/CD pipeline requires Devops knowledge and can be set up either in your local computer or in a separate virtual server in the cloud. Github Actions, Jenkins, Gitlab are the most popular tools which can help in both building the pipeline as well as hosting it as a server which performs actual integration and deployment actions.
In this way you will cover all the basic things that a website needs:
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