The 10 Skills Needed to Build an Effective Website

Content Management Systems such as WordPress offer a framework that makes coding a website much less expensive and labor intensive than ever before. However, even the best framework needs customization to deliver the optimal experience. Therefore, WordPress developers should be versed in the languages that WordPress runs on – primarily PHP, SQL, CSS, and JavaScript.

Virtually every web development firm excels at web development/coding. However, too often, web developers get tasked with jobs that are not part of their core skill set. Here’s a short list of the tasks that fall squarely in the wheelhouse of the web developer/coder:

• Ensuring that each page is the site is mobile-responsive (optimized for mobile devices such as phones and tablets). Often, this requires extra coding to ensure that every element on each page is sized properly and looks good across the latest versions of common operating systems.
• Optimizing the site’s images for fast loading and configuring site caching so that pages load quickly and efficiently.
• Ensuring that all pages are being served securely (via HTTPS).
• Making sure that your site and server have the proper security measures in place to thwart brute force hacking attempts and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
• Ensuring that your site and/or server is properly configured to regularly back up your pages and database.
• Making sure that any customizations to your website’s code are preserved such that they don’t get overwritten with software updates (such as updates to a WordPress site’s plugins).