Designing and developing web applications can be difficult, whether you’re creating something from scratch or turning an existing application into a web-based version of itself. Although there are many technical challenges to overcome, some of the biggest challenges can come from non-technical sources such as budget constraints, limitations set by the customer, or the limitations of your own imagination.
In fact, there are many unique challenges that designers and developers face. If you want to create or maintain a successful website, then you must be familiar with these 8 challenges in web application design and development to better serve your customers and streamline your business processes.
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Compatible across different browsers is a challenge. Compatibility with new browsers, old browsers, mobile devices… some just barely functional. A lot of work goes into making sure your application runs smoothly on any platform or browser that’s likely to be used by its users. One of those applications may be yours!
That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re compatible across all common platforms from desktop to tablet to smartphone operating systems. Sometimes that even means including an option for IE6 on Windows XP which (even though it hasn’t been updated since 2008) still claims about 8% of web traffic share as of January 2020! It can also mean coming up with interesting workarounds for web compatibility issues like Flash or IE6’s idiosyncrasies.
Cross-device consistency is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing web application developers today. When a user interacts with your application across different devices, like a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone, it’s important that they still experience exactly what they expect when interacting with any piece of content.
For example, if you allow comments on an image on your website to be shared on Facebook, it shouldn’t be difficult for users to share that same comment across their different social media platforms. It might not seem like a big deal at first glance—after all, consistency has its downsides. For example, Consistency is impossible when using responsive design – especially if you’re trying to create consistent interactions between different types of interfaces.
Choosing the right tech stack is a challenge. Almost every web development framework, language, and platform is a viable option. How do you narrow down your options? The process of finding the right tech stack can be overwhelming if you’re new to the industry or don’t know where to start.
But there are a few ways you can make it easier on yourself. For starters, do your research: Technology trends change quickly, but information about what tools are popular and why they’re popular doesn’t. For example, why did so many people start using Meteor? What kind of businesses benefit from Laravel? You should also start by thinking about your experience level: Are you a developer looking for an introduction to full-stack development?
As it turns out, responsive web applications are challenging to design, develop, test, deploy, and scale. It’s a level of complexity that many application owners don’t realize until they’re knee-deep in a project. It’s possible to sidestep some of these challenges when building new applications or even when making existing ones more responsive.
Good Read: 7 Web Development Steps to Design the Perfect Website
When users have multiple sources of identity information (e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter), Single Sign On (SSO) can help provide a more consistent experience by allowing users to log in with an identity they’ve previously granted permission to that application.
Unfortunately, properly implementing SSO requires a robust set of identity providers that securely communicate with each other, as well as other applications your system will be communicating with.
The general process for handling SSO looks like this: Try to load a user’s profile from an external provider; If it loads successfully, logs them in; if not try another provider until you find one that works or give up after exhausting all options.
For some businesses, it’s about getting data into and out of your system as quickly as possible. For others, it’s about making sure every design element and code line-of-code is executed perfectly. Web applications need to handle both scenarios—and all sorts of other challenges—to be truly successful.
For example, web application performance and speed affect user experience significantly. If a web application takes too long to load, users are likely to think they’ve reached a broken site or simply move on to another site altogether. Making sure a web application loads quickly is one way to ensure you retain customers and increase conversion rates.
This is especially true for eCommerce websites that rely on an engaged customer base who frequently make purchases on their website.
One of the biggest web development challenges is security. If a website is hacked, malicious content could be put up on your site. What’s more, it could link to other sites that have been hacked too, leading to even bigger problems. While you can try to secure websites as best you can, problems do happen.
As a result, you need a backup plan for when a user does find something wrong with your website or detects an attempt at hacking—especially since bad press from hacking can last for years and drive away users.
When you develop a web application you need to worry about scalability. If your website gets popular very quickly it should be able to handle those large amounts of traffic with no problems. A website that’s not scalable will result in poor performance, bad user experience and ultimately increased abandonment rate.
When an application is not scalable it means that adding more servers to support more users doesn’t have any effect on improving performance. For example: adding one hundred users might already slow down your system drastically and adding one thousand new users won’t solve anything unless you add even more servers than before. There are different ways to deal with lack of scalability but luckily there are also solutions for pretty much every problem when it comes to creating an application that can scale well.
Whether you’re working on a large web application or a small personal project, there are always web development challenges that come with it. There are several universal problems that exist for all websites (scalability, usability, accessibility), but there are also unique issues that come up when creating an online presence.
It can be difficult to foresee these problems ahead of time, especially if you have no prior experience with web design or development. A reputed website development company in India can help you cope with these challenges in an effective manner.
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