Importance of Workflow Rule
[lwptoc]
After 10 years in the web development industry, I have come to appreciate the importance of adhering to workflow rules. If you never thought about keeping a record of your projects, like describing your work, goals, what you could have done better, etc. All these things are very important aspects of web development.
You should be able to convince your potential clients that you understand what you doing “I don’t just make things that look nice, I set goals and solve problems. Maybe the project succeeded, maybe it didn’t, but I learned x, y, and z.” That’s something to keep in mind for all of you.
It’s a good practice to document your workflow! That is something that I have learned over the years. When we started building Infinity it had titles and sub-titles for each section. Trying to remember back and write compelling content for each section was daunting, and I’m sure I forgot a few important details.
We started as a team of five developers and divided the tasks among ourselves randomly. When we sat down for our first sessions, we didn’t know how and where to start, no workflow rule mattered at the time, so you could say we got a rough start but we all have to start somewhere! Sometimes it takes a few tries to get things into your head, so don’t worry if you’re having a hard time in the beginning.
As you progressively grow your business and interact more with clients, it will be an eye-opening experience to have to talk about your work methods with people you didn’t know and to be able to present and “sell” your services.
If you also intend to do things like graphic design, like logos for the local business entrepreneurs and designing some icons. Logo design is a fairly large part of web design, and it’s probably one of those areas where knowing key fundamental workflow rules will make life a bit easier.
You certainly need to interest yourself in content management systems. They also come in handy with workflow documentation tools. CMSs are tools like WordPress or Drupal that allow people who don’t know how to code to create web pages and edit content with much ease.
If you never heard of content management systems or WordPress at this point, don’t despair, am assuming it will be exciting when you eventually try it out. You don’t have to develop or create websites by only writing HTML on static pages, learn some of these CMS instead, they’re really much more open and dynamic.
For the other websites we made there, we use some expensive proprietary CMS that the clients were able to pay for. So at your job, you may use something open-source like WordPress, or have to learn something else from scratch after you get the job.
So I will post some of our early portfolio websites in another article. They’re kind of funny, but we were proud of them! Web design in general has come a long way since we started, and we’ve definitely come a long way as designers. We all have to start somewhere.
We created our first ever website in 2018! It was pretty basic HTML and CSS but things got a little better later on as our skills improve and got a lot more experience. Then later that year after learning about responsive design (making websites that work on all screen sizes), we redesigned our site using percent widths instead of pixel widths. Not fully responsive, but it was a start! It was relaunched by the beginning of 2018.
The site has evolved since to its current status. I haven’t been job hunting, so it’s less of a priority for me. Before I hadn’t been using a CMS, but I switched between multiple CMS like WordPress, Zomex for this site. I bought a theme and customized it since it was time-consuming to build a custom theme from scratch.