Web Development Trend Traps

Web Development Trend Traps that developers should avoid falling into.

The web development industry is consistently changing. Trends emerge almost daily and debut with gold and silver linings in a bid to entice developers into early and potentially unproductive adoption. Seasoned developers tend to look a bit further and assess technologies for their merits in strategic value, architectural philosophy and overall practicality.

In this article, we will review what we need to be aware of when we are brandished with a new technology or framework.

JavaScript Frameworks

There are quite a few Javascript frameworks that allow a developer to do end-to-end development of a web application. The most prevalent ones can be identified in Angular, React and Vue. The major problem however, is that many web designers are quick to focus on the frameworks without having fundamental knowledge of Javascript. It is important to be proficient in Javascript and have an understanding of it’s foundations.

CSS Frameworks (Bootstrap, Foundation,Pure, etc.)

Bootstrap is arguably the most popular CSS Framework and is excellent for whipping up clean and attractive interfaces in no time. The problem however is that you do not need to understand CSS to the fullest to take advantage of this. The bigger problem is that many young developers and engineers skip the step of learning CSS, and go straight to Bootstrap. This is perfect until the client needs something that Bootstrap does not offer out of the box.

This is not me discrediting the place that Bootstrap has in development. In fact, I have developed ASP.NET and PHP courses on web development using Bootstrap. I however encourage would be developers to get the fundamental knowledge and understanding of CSS, which will allow you to take Bootstrap (and like frameworks) to the next level.

Presentation over Performance

If one thing is clear in this day and age, it is that information needs to be at our fingertips and on demand. This means that people are not waiting on a website to load like they used to (flashback to dial-up dayzzzzz). When building our website, we want to ensure that content loads as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, making a website seem interactive and attractive requires more content, increasing load time. You may want to look into using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to host static files, reducing the work your server needs to do to serve up content.

Conclusion

There are so many factors that go into web application development. In the following courses, you are guided through development considerations using ASP.NET MVC and PHP.