Website Development Considerations

For the development of most websites, there are numerous options that can be considered. Each option has an impact on the speed of development, cost of the project, extensibility of the solution, and other considerations.

Third-Party Frameworks

There are numerous Open Source Content Management Frameworks on the market to our availability. Using such frameworks allows for almost-instant functionality and often covers 80% of the required deliverables with little configuration.

Such frameworks however usually limit the design flexibility of the site. Furthermore, some small requirements could result in a large effort to realize as the existing codebase can be huge and cumbersome.

Code ownership may be an issue here, as well as overall site performance.

Rapid Application Development Tools

There are some excellent tools that allow developers to create highly functional solutions in a much shorter time span. This can drastically reduce costs, and speed up the time-to-market of the solution. Future changes can also be much faster and thereby more responsive to market conditions.

These RAD tools often allow for easy creation of 95% of the requirements with a low overhead cost. On occasion the small detail requirements in the 5% they do not allow for can become intensive, expensive, or impossible, as development is restricted to the RAD environment.

Custom Coding

For maximum flexibility, hand-coding provides the best results. When coding all functionality from scratch, the developers have full control over the outcome, and can easily achieve the exact requirements with little to no compromise.

The down-side of hand-coding is that it can be very man-power intensive. This results in longer development timelines, and higher cost. However code ownership is completely to the client, and the solution is exact.

Resulting performance is optimal, and future extensibility is unlimited.