All you should know about web development
By: Blog Moove-It
Tags: Performance, Good Practices, Productivity, Interface, Security

I want to share with you a compilation of topics you should know if you are planning on developing a successful web application. This list is just a collection of the best suggestions I read from this discussion on Stack Overflow. All credit goes to all the people who contributed on that thread, I’m just picking the best topics from there.

All the practices mentioned fall into the following categories: Security, Performance, Interface, SEO, Maintenance and Productivity.

Security

This is my favorite topic, if you ask me what is my best advice about security this is it: Never trust user input (that means cookies too!)

Other advices mentioned were…

Performance

Techniques on making our site lighter and faster.

Optimize images — don’t use a 20 KB image for a repeating background

Learn how to gzip/deflate content

Combine/concatenate multiple stylesheets or multiple script files to reduce number of browser connections and improve gzip ability to compress duplications between files

Take a look at the Yahoo Exceptional Performance site, lots of great guidelines including improving front-end performance and their YSlow tool. Google page speed is another tool for performance profiling. Both require Firebug installed.

Use CSS Image Sprites for small related images like toolbars (see the “minimize http requests” point)

Busy web sites should consider splitting components across domains.

Static content (ie, images, CSS, JavaScript, and generally content that doesn’t need access to cookies) should go in a separate domain that does not use cookies, because all cookies for a domain and it’s subdomains are sent with every request to the domain and its subdomains. One good option here is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Utilize Google Closure Compiler for JavaScript and other minification tools

Interface

Be aware that browsers implement standards inconsistently and make sure your site works reasonably well across all major browsers. At a minimum test against a recent Gecko engine (Firefox), a Webkit engine (Safari, Chrome, and some mobile browsers), your supported IE browsers (take advantage of the Application Compatibility VPC Images), and Opera. Also consider how browsers render your site in different operating systems.

Staging: How to deploy updates without affecting your users.

Don’t display unfriendly errors directly to the user

Don’t put users’ email addresses in plain text as they will get spammed.

Build well-considered limits into your site

Learn how to do progressive enhancement

Always redirect after a POST.

SEO

Consider URLs, a URL design with REST in mind could make exposing APIs easier in the future. Definitely much easier to get your URLs right the first time then to change them in the future and deal with the SEO consequences.

Avoid links that say “click here”.

Use “search engine friendly” URL’s, i.e. use example.com/pages/45-article-title instead of example.com/index.php?page=45

Have an XML sitemap

Use <link rel=”canonical” … /> when you have multiple URLs that point to the same content

Use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer

Install Google Analytics right at the start

Know how robots.txt and search engine spiders work

Redirect requests (using 301 Moved Permanently) asking for www.example.com to example.com (or the other way round) to prevent splitting the google ranking between both sites

Know that there can be bad behaving spiders out there

Manteinance and Productivity

Understand you’ll spend 20% of the time coding and 80% of it maintaining

Set up a good error reporting solution

Have some system for people to contact you with suggestions and criticism.

Document how the application works for future support staff and people performing maintenance

Make frequent backups! (And make sure those backups are functional)

Don’t forget to do your Unit Testing.

Get it looking correct in Firefox first, then Internet Explorer.

Code from the beginning with maintainability in mind

I hope you learn something new from this list the same way I did.

Thanks to all the people from Stack Overflow community that contributed in such a rich discussion of web development practices.

We will focus on some of those topics in upcoming posts.