Design and Development – 4 Tips for Those Who Don’t Want to Waste a Second

Design and Development – 4 Tips for Those Who Don’t Want to Waste a Second

All developers, no matter how good and successful they are have the same problem, they don’t have as much time as they would like. This is especially true if you make a breakthrough and people love how you do work. Soon everyone wants a piece of you and they all want you to finish the job as quickly as possible.

The quality of work we do directly depends on the time invested. Additionally, we all know that a single mistake can make the process even longer and set us back. On the other hand, there are people that are always worried about their time and they don’t plan things properly, ending up taking even longer to finish a project.

To finish your development and design projects in the least time possible, you need to find that sweet spot in the middle that will help you do everything right and make the best use of your time at work. Today we will share some tips that can help you achieve this.

Make users a vital part of your design

If you don’t know what you want to achieve with your web design and development, you could get lost during the process and stop to think about how the next stage will fit in with the work you’ve done so far. On the other hand, you might start doubting the work you’ve done so far, or make mistakes that will take a lot of time to fix.

Understand the goals of the website you are building, who will be using it, what the journey map will look like, and only after that can you start developing or designing. The user approach must be considered or your work will suffer. Even worse, your employees will not be satisfied with the end result of the project.

Make a plan before you start

All projects rely on plans to succeed. With a plan, you will be able to imagine features that need to be designed or developed and come up with methods that you will use to create them. It will be easier to focus on the tasks at hand and create a structure for the whole project.

You can break down the project into smaller parts on which you can focus effectively and manage them better. Don’t look to create a perfect plan because it’s impossible, you’ll just waste time. Instead, create a blueprint that will be the backbone of the projects and add new steps as you go.

A lot of web designers and developers simply over-plan and this kills their productivity. You can also use an app such as Evernote to write down all the important aspects of your plan and remind yourself of them when needed.

Rely on convenient technology solutions

A lot of designers forget about frameworks and how useful they can be. Bootstrap is a very useful UI framework that can help create great designs very quickly. For PHP projects, there are many useful frameworks such as Symfony, Zend Framework, CakePHP, Aura, and so on. For JavaScript coding, you can use AJAX, Meteor or JQuery to boost productivity.

You can also use various libraries to save time. Some CSS libraries such as Hover.css and Animate.css make creating hover effects and animation implementation a lot easier. Flexible Grid System and Semantic Grid System are some other good examples of CSS libraries that save valuable time.

There are many plugins out there that can help you finish your work faster because they allow you to add more features within the project without writing a single line of code. You can find many different plugins online that are great time-savers.

Make your coding more effective

Don’t waste time writing all of the code manually. You can rely on modules, loops and functions within your language for parts that are repeated over and over. You can also write a program that will make code for your project, and this is how you will automate simple tasks that are time consuming.

Custom code snippets can be very helpful when a project needs the same line of code on different locations. You can use an IDE like Dreamweaver with CSS Desk, or CodePen and other online editors to make custom snippets. If it comes down to it, you can also simply copy a line of code somewhere and paste it into your project when you need to.

All the different languages used for development have their own tricks you need to discover to make yourself more efficient. In the end, the important thing is to always think about your work and discover new things. If you don’t stop learning, your work will constantly improve and you’ll become better and faster. The best way to become fast is to not let yourself get lazy and do your work like a robot.