What is the Most Important Component of a New Website?

Tue, Jan 25th, 2022

At first glance, it might seem that a website's appearance is its most important part. After all, people interact with websites every day without ever considering how they work behind the scenes. However, there is a reason why web developers take months to design a single site while graphic designers can finish entire projects in mere days.

There are a lot of things that go into a good website, and some of these things will even surprise you. For example, most people don't realize that a website's development is its true backbone.

Websites are made up of pages and images, but those cannot function on their own. When you look at a web page, you see the text and images as they appear on your monitor or phone screen. What you don't see is the code and markup underneath it all that tells each element exactly where to go and what to do when someone interacts with it. Without this foundational coding, all of those carefully-designed images would be just bits of data strewn about randomly for no particular reason at all.

Can't I Just Use a Website Template Company and Do It Myself?

Although some online tools can create entire websites with no coding whatsoever, such as Wix or other website builders, even these tools need skilled programmers behind them to do their job. Without good web development, even the most well-designed and functional website would be completely unusable and unreadable by search engines and mobile devices.

Websites that load slowly and frustrate users can damage a company's reputation. A poorly coded website can kill your SEO efforts before they ever get started, causing you to lose out on thousands of dollars in revenue every year for no reason whatsoever. If your site's pages don't load quickly enough for people to read or engage with your content, they will leave, taking their business elsewhere.

You might think this is an exaggeration, but it isn't at all; there are dozens of companies who have gone under because their websites' technical issues caused them to plummet in rankings and lose customers at breakneck speeds.

Do You Think Web Development is Easy?

Many people assume that website development is easy because you don't need to know how to write code yourself, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Every time you visit a website, your browser is reading the HTML, CSS and JavaScript behind it. That's why some poorly-coded websites will actually cause problems for users on certain browsers or devices even though everything looks fine on paper.

It is incredibly unlikely that anyone will ever go through all of your site's pages manually to check their coding. For example, Google won't look beyond about 20 lines of Javascript before deciding whether or not your website's content violates its guidelines. This means that just one minor mistake could cause your entire business to go under without you ever knowing what happened.

In fact, because search engines cannot actually see images or the design of your website, it is very likely that they will not bother indexing all of its pages properly. This would leave a large portion of your content completely invisible to visitors and doomed to remain undiscovered forever.

Isn't It Good to Hire the Cheapest Web Developer?

This is why you should never choose a web developer based solely on price. Even if their bid seems lower than everyone else's, it could come back to haunt you later when your site stops loading for users, gets hacked by cybercriminals, or fails to get indexed by Google. In many cases, the cheapest option isn't even half as good as an affordable but reliable company because designers can easily skimp on quality without anyone being any the wiser.

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