Web development services are a hot commodity in a digital world that shows no signs of abating. Small businesses and big corporations alike want skilled people who know how to utilize the web for commercial advantage. Schools are churning out web developers as fast as they are being hired. But those graduates don’t know everything.
Just as in any other industry, there are vast differences between what is learned in school and what real life requires. Every newly graduated web developer must face that unpleasant learning curve that comes with hands-on experience. Fortunately, experience breeds the skill and knowledge that makes a web developer truly successful.
How important is hands-on experience? Consider the five following web development principles you will never learn in school:
1. Visitors Don’t Want to Think
When you visit a website, do you want to have to sit and think about how to navigate it? No. You want to click and go. You want your journey to be as mindless as possible, at least in terms of finding your way around. All your thinking should go into the content you absorb.
This fundamental truth dictates something particularly important to web development: keeping it simple. According to the experts at Salt Lake City’s Webtek Digital Marketing, simpler is better. If a website requires too much thinking to navigate, people will not bother.
2. Visitors Have Limited Attention Spans
If nothing else, the internet age has robbed people of the ability to focus for extended periods of time. This translates into yet another fundamental truth: website visitors have limited attention spans. If it takes them too long to accomplish a task, they won’t bother completing it. They will simply move on.
3. Visitors Are Willing to Be Led
In the early days of web, it was believed that website visitors did not want to be led in any particular journey. They wanted information presented in such a way as to allow them to travel their own journey. That was back before there were billions of pages on the internet. Today, things are different. Not only are visitors willing to be led, but they also want to be.
Imagine a shopper looking for particular pair of sneakers on an e-commerce site. He wants to find those sneakers through a journey that takes just two or three steps. If he has to hunt for them like they were buried treasure, doing so will be too much work.
4. Visitors Don’t Mind Blank Space
Have you ever noticed that some websites are incredibly busy? Visually speaking, there is so much going on that it is tough to find blank space. Well, guess what? Visitors don’t mind blank space. In fact, they appreciate it. Blank space gives the eyes an opportunity to rest. It gives the visitor’s brain permission to ignore that space rather than having to process yet more information. That’s why less busy websites tend to be more attractive.
5. Visitors Appreciate Convention
Finally, web development services do not always have to be about the newest thing or latest craze. In fact, developers should be incredibly careful about chasing trends. Website visitors actually prefer convention. They prefer being able to go on to a website and navigate quickly and easily. They don’t mind new stuff, but if the new stuff throws them off, you can bet they will mind.
Web development services continue to be a critical component of the modern world. You could go to school to be a web developer and have no trouble getting work after graduation. Just remember that they will not teach you everything in school.
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