Ethiopian Design

With a plethora of web site development tools available, how do you choose ones that will support usability in the development process? Because of the rapidly changing landscape of development systems, no single tool will meet every organization’s needs. We can, however, list some of the more useful features to consider when evaluating tools for your own development needs.

Just as it’s critical to understand the users when developing a web site, it is perhaps even more critical to understand your own developers when choosing a development environment. Simply using freely available tools is not always the most cost effective path. When evaluating tools, consider at least four broad areas for the usability of the tools: project management, site and asset management, coding support, and technology support.

Project Management
What support does the tool provide for project management functions? In particular, support for the following areas would be helpful:

• Collaboration and version control – support for development teams working on a single code base, which limits version confusion and prevents mistakenly overwriting more recent code.
• Design notes – the ability to add notes or tasks to individual pages regarding status or tasks.
• Project management facilities – support for maintaining project task status, assigning tasks to team members, and producing status reports.

Site and Asset Management
How usable is the functionality for building the architecture of the site and managing the digital assets?
• Site maps – can the site be designed visually in either a tree structure or in outline form?
• Site importing and exporting – can existing sites be imported or exported?
• Asset views – can all assets of a particular type be organized in a coherent manner?
• Template creation – can page templates be created easily?
• File transfer – can modified pages be automatically transferred to staging and production servers?
Coding Support
How well does the tool support the coding of individual web pages? The following features are particularly useful:
• Text coloring – use color to automatically differentiate between HTML, scripts, and content.
• Syntax checking check code syntax for valid constructs.
• Link checking check links for invalid or dead links.
• Accessibility checking make sure that ALT tags and other code elements are used to ensure equal accessibility to the content.
• Code indenting help the developer organize the code in a readable form.
• WYSIWYG and code views – switch easily between code and page layout views.
• Script editing and debugging – provide tools for editing and debugging the scripting language of choice.
• Table creation – provide graphic tools for laying out tables and form views for specifying exact parameters.
• Form creation – provide drag-and-drop or other tools for rapidly creating HTML forms.
• No code mangling – automated tools should never change code you’ve written by hand.

Technology Support
Every organization and development team has certain technologies in which it specializes. How well does the tool support the use of those technologies?

• Dependence on nonstandard server technologies – does the development environment depend on server technologies that will limit how you deploy the site?
• Style sheets – is there support for creating, maintaining, and using style sheets?
• XML – does the environment support XML?
• Database integration – how easily can you create database driven sites?
• Plug-in support – does the environment support third-party plug-ins for technologies it does not directly support?
• Project-specific technologies – can you easily develop sites using technologies with which your development team is proficient?

New development environments and new versions of existing tools are continually becoming available. For productivity and, ultimately, for the usability of the web sites you are developing, your team should have usable development tools that fit the way they work and that support your organization’s development processes.

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