Responsibilities of Creating a Website
- There are a number of different jobs required during the creation of a website, and there is no standard way of divvying them up. The following tasks could all be done by a single person, or each could have an entire department of people working on them:
Web Design: creating the layout and organization of your site.
Graphic Design: creating the images and logos of your site.
Programming: coding the site to fit the web designer's vision.
Marketing: making sure people come to the site, which includes creating a social networking presence, strengthening SEO and possibly buying ad campaigns. - Designing a website is one thing, but you actually have to put it on the Internet at some point. That requires registering a domain name (like "ehow.com"), buying a hosting plan, setting up email accounts and databases and uploading the site's files to your host-provided server.
- Websites can be viewed on a number of different operating systems with dozens of different screen resolutions, as well as mobile devices that are every different size you can think of. It's your responsibility to make sure your website is as accessible as possible -- just because it looks great on Internet Explorer doesn't mean it will look good on Firefox, let alone an iPhone.
Each programming language has its own set of standards for what constitutes good and bad code. It's the programmer's responsibility to make the site as standards-compliant as possible, which will in turn help the site's accessibility. - Just like any other publishing platform, the web has a set of ethics that needs to be considered. "Hotlinking" images (embedding images on your site from another website, and thereby leeching off the other site's bandwidth) will make everyone hate you in a hurry, as will failing to credit someone else's work with a link to the site. And stealing another site's design is a form of plagiarism. It's your responsibility to be familiar with what's considered ethical on the web, and what's not.
- All websites collect personal information. Even non-commercial sites that don't require credit cards or log-in sections still log users' IP addresses. It's your responsibility to protect each user's information and create an official privacy policy. If your site does have some sort of checkout section, make sure information is transferred across the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol - Secure (HTTPS) and uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
