:: Expertise in Web Development

In order to create a quality website a combination of interrelated abilities and skills is required. On this page we give a brief overview of these different skills of which several are our fields of expertise and we will explain the different steps involved to build and launch a quality website. If you are going to contact us for your next website you will know which steps we are going to follow and what we are going to require from you. If you do not want to hire a professional web developer and have decided you want to take things into your own hands these pages might help you to get started. If you are a professional web designer and require a web programmer, this page will inform you about the programming languages you can hire us for.

:: Web Planning, Design, Programming, Contents-writing and Production

Getting a quality website up and running is more difficult than it seems. Like so many things in life the first step is to make a plan. Web-planning is also called web-architecture and like architecture itself involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria and is a distillation of several fields: web-usability, information architecture, user-experience design, interaction design, user-interface design, human-computer interaction, information design, web-design and graphic design. During the planning stage of the website, which is probably the most important stage of the whole process, the client's needs and online goals must be determined and a plan drawn up to reach these goals.

Once the plan complete we come to the design stage where digital artists use the previously elaborated plan and prepare the layouts of the website. A good design deals with the relation between its elements and creates a balance between them. Composition, colour, texture, and typography are the main basic ingredients for any design, whether for print or for the World Wide Web.

With the layouts prepared and the functionality planned the code is written to make the website come "alive". As promoters of open source software our platform of choice is LINUX and all our projects are written in open source programming languages. In the following sections we give a little overview of these "languages" and what they are used for:

:: PHP

PHP is an Open Source "server-side" scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. "Server-side" means that it runs on a web server reachable from a users local computer (the client). Operations are usually performed server-side because they require access to information (a database) or functionality that is not available on the client or requires typical behaviour that is unreliable when it is done client-side. PHP has become incredibly popular within the web development community. PHPs early growth can be largely attributed to its open-source roots as a free language that is highly compatible with other, also hugely popular Open Source technologies such as MySQL, Apache and Linux

:: MySQL

MySQL is an open source relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL and it is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.

:: Xhtml

Xhtml, which stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup is a language in which web pages are written. It is a combination of two other languages, HTML and XML and was developed to make HTML more extensible and increase interoperability with other data formats. XML is a markup language where everything must be marked up correctly, which results in 'well-formed' documents.

Today's market consists of different browser technologies, some browsers run on computers, and some browsers run on mobile phones or other small devices. The latter cannot, in many cases interpret a 'bad' markup language. Therefore, by combining the strengths of HTML and XML, W3C recommended a markup language that is useful now and in the future.

» Read more about Xhtml in our Standards Section

:: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS is a mechanism for adding styles to web documents. Through the use of CSS (cascading stylesheets) the same style elements can be applied to every page of a site. From the first page onwards, visitors will be presented with a consistent design scheme, building their comfort level and effectively promoting your brand or service.

:: Ajax

Ajax is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. This web-site is done with Ajax, as you can see the information reloads wihout reloading the complete page.

:: JQuery

JQuery is a lightweight Javascript library that simplifies a lot of client-side programming tasks and enables programmers to produce a lot more in less time. The JQuery library has become very popular among web developers and is being used by many of the big companies on the internet and even companies like Microsoft and Nokia have announced plans to bundle JQuery on their platforms.

:: Context-Writing

Now the website is functional it is loaded onto a test server and the texts and other contents can be added. Although we do not write the contents for the web-sites ourselves at AVDL, Web Development programming and Design we do have reliable sources available. Contents writing for websites is a profession aside and for the best results should be left to people specialized in the matter. Texts should be key-word rich and especially written with the search engines in mind. Most of the websites we produce are dynamic websites and equipped with easy to use contents management systems. In most cases the contents are added to the web site through these contents management systems by either the client him/herself or a third party frequently on an ongoing basis.

Because we are located in Marbella on the Costa del Sol in Spain which is an international environment, most of our clients require multilingual websites. We found that for a website to appeal to a certain nationality, the contents should be written by a native speaker. We have trained translators for different nationalities available and can produce websites in a variety of European languages.

:: Testing & Production

While the contents is being added (or has been added), the website has to be tested. Testing a site means conducting Quality Assurance. During the programming or building process, the site has been tested against different browsers and platforms to ensure it is rendering correctly and not breaking or displaying incorrectly, but Quality Assurance goes a little further than just that. The code must also be validated, checked to comply with accessibility standards and functionality.

» Read more about Accesibility and Web Standards

During the testing phase the website is also "fine tuned" with regards to loading speed and optimized for the search engines. All the web sites we produce at AVDL Web Development Programming and design comply with Google's guidelines to ensure quick and correct indexing with the search engines.

Finally the site is handed off, moved from the test-server to the final server, submitted to the search engines and the E-mail accounts created. Nowadays the social networks play an important role in the visibility of a website so during this final production stage the links and resources with regards to the social network are also put into place.

By no means does the relationship with our clients end here. We give a quality guarantee for several months with each website and as an option we offer our clients a maintenance contract.