Web skills required to develop a great website

In the golden days of programming, life was relatively easy. The development of applications was for mainframes or mini-computers and required a limited set of skills. Those days are over. Today's web environment, although very rich in terms of capabilities, is extremely complex and required a very long list of skills.

This means that you cannot expect to have a great website if it is built by a couple of guys who do everything.

Skills by development phase

To build a good website, different skills are required depending on the development phase. For the strategy phase where the WHAT is defined, a combination of business and technology skills are required. In the web development phase (in green in the table), the knowledge required is more technical. Between those two phase is the design of the solution phase where skills in web user interfaces are most important. However, a good understanding of the business and technical issues is also required but not at the same depth.

Strategy	Design of Solution	Web Development
Business strategy Marketing Web strategy Web marketing Web architecture Information architecture User interface (UX) Analytics Web technology	Information architecture Business analysis Functional analysis Usability patterns Page design Persuasion Prototyping Search engine best practices for SEO and SEM Design of landing pages Accessibility Social networks Mobile devices Technology architecture	HTML, CSS Client-side programming (js, ajax) Server-side programming (php, c#, java) Usability / UX Visual design Writing for the web Response time optimization Audio/video production Search engine optimization Search engine marketing WCAG (accessibility) CMS (Content Management Systems) Web services (WSDL, XML) Database setup & design Server setup & maintenance Web infrastructure SSL & security

Take away

The purpose of this post is to make you realize a few things. Web development is complex and requires a large number of skills. In the same way that you will not find good building architects that are also very good at plumbing, painting and electricity, you will not find a single person that is good in all 30+ web skills. The larger and more complex your website is, the larger the team of specialists needed to build a great website.

Speaking of great websites, how is your's? Poor, OK or great? Read my article Website maturity model and see where your website is positioned.