Blog · 4 things our little web design company learnt in 2011 · How we've learnt, grown and changed for the better this past year
It's been a great year for us, and both the web and our little web design company have really grown throughout 2011. Here's 4 things our web design crew have learned this year...
1) @font-face is awesome
In the past year use of techniques like @font-face have really taken off - it seems we're finally reaching the tipping point where most web browsers support such features. We like @font-face so much we blogged about it back in May.
@font-face allows us to choose from among thousands of different typefaces when designing websites. This along with CSS3 has vastly expanded the possibilities and removed the limitations on how beautiful the web can look.
2) Don't be afraid of frameworks & libraries
Early this year we expanded our toolkit to include jQuery, moving beyond basic Javascript, to include some more advanced and asynchronous interaction, as well as display and animation techniques.
jQuery has enabled us to do some pretty nifty things really quickly. I fondly remember the eureka moment when I realised the convoluted 10 to 20 lines of code used to make an AJAX call could be done in one line with jQuery (and it was a short line!).
3) Project process is important
I’d say this is the most important thing we’ve learnt as a business - having a firm idea of your standard process, and how your project should progress. We blogged about our process back in June, and since then we’ve seen a large number of benefits from having a standard process...
- It helps us give good customer service - it sets the expectations of clients, keeps the number of changes under control, and allows us to set more definite deadlines, and meet them too!
- It aids teamwork - it’s helped us know what we each need to do and to focus on our specific parts of a project.
- It’s shown me that design is important - our process has helped us focus on the design stage of projects and get things looking spot on
- Having a standard process means we can change it! It’s helped us see where bottlenecks are and ultimately helps us work more efficiently.
4) Think about hosting
And be prepared to grow too! We’ve seen a number of projects take off in a big way this year, outgrowing shared and even dedicated server hosting.
We’ve also worked with a number of projects requiring us to work with some very specific hosting setups to achieve some clever things for our clients, for example, getting Active Directory talking to PHP hosted on an IIS server.
Even if you have the most beautiful, professional, effective website - if the speed of the website is lacking, or the hosting space or specs are inadequate, then you’ll be missing out!
So, what about next year?
At Resound, we’re really looking forward to what 2012 holds, and we’re sure there’ll be plenty to learn!
To mention but a few, we’re looking forward to responsive design really taking off, HTML5 being taken up even more, experimenting with more frameworks to help us provide a more efficient service, and continuing to grow our little company in number, knowledge and experience!
Ben J Walker · 21st December 2011
Ben founded Resound Design back in 2006 after completing a Computing degree. He now spends his time designing websites, coding web apps, and drinking tea.
What do you think?