Without knowing the details about your clients current web application, database layer, and server configurations you may quickly find yourself scratching your head when deploying that slick web 2.0 app using the latest and greatest onto your clients circa 1998 clunker running PHP 3 and MySQL 3. Here are some useful tips all web developers and web designers should know.
Who is your web host?
You can get most the information you need just by asking who the clients web host is. See below if they are running their own server. Also remember you lose certain functionality through certain hosts. Some hosts disable unlink forcing you to use a work around.
What version of PHP and MySQL are you running?
They may not know this. That’s fine, phpinfo is your friend. This will tell you if you can use those sweet OOP features of PHP 5.x, whether you can use native JSON support, if they have MySQLi setup, and lots more. You’ll want to mirror your clients production environment as closely as possible in your development environment.
What platform is your website running on?
Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris? It could be any of these and several others. If you’ve worked on several platforms before you know that you lose functionality when switching between them. Don’t expect to be able to run exec on a Windows server.
Does your client have specific browser requirements?
As of this writing I develop websites to be compatible with Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Fire Fox 3, and the latest version of Safari. I’m not wasting my time on Google Chrome, Opera, or any of the Linux browsers. Your client may have specific requirements and come deployment you don’t want them screaming about the website not working on some niche browser.
Does your client have specific screen resolution requirements?
If the web applications target audience is people with bad eyes you just might need to support 800×600. Generally 1024×768 is just fine, but be sure to ask.
Load time requirements
Is the client willing to sacrifice an extra second or two for some nice PNG-24 images or do they want it to load faster than that? Sometimes GIFs carry a smaller footprint then JPGs and vice-versa. It depends on the type of graphic.
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Tags: project management