Web Development

Websites are fairly complicated. Like a car, they have a lot of moving parts, and most people have absolutely no idea what’s under the hood. And they really don’t care. All they care about is if the darn thing starts when they turn the key. Does it get them from home to work? From work to the gym? From the gym to pick up their kids at school? And then back home? Yes? Great. Then it works. That’s all they need to know.

Lieder Digital views web development like that. Most of our clients have no clue what powers the websites we’ve built for them, and they don’t care to. And, while we’re always happy to explain to them if they so desire, we rarely do because they almost never ask.

If you talk to some website development companies, they’ll start vomiting acronyms and jargon at you. They’ll spew out a long list of confusing terms you’ve never heard before, maybe trying to impress you, or trying to scare you into thinking it’s all very secret and magical and far too complicated for a lowly client like you to understand. We think that’s silly at best, and insulting at worst.

The websites we build are designed and built using whatever it takes to get the job done. These days, with the clientele we serve, that’s almost always WordPress. As of last count, WordPress powers 42% of all the websites on the entire internet. We not be expert mathematicians (okay, we’ll admit it: we’re not mathematicians at all) but we have a feeling that a math professor might say this has “statistical significance.” (If you’re a real nerd for statistics, check out the latest data on WordPress. Seriously, it’s off the charts. WordPress is not only the world’s most popular content management system, it’s ten times more popular than the next biggest competitor. Again: see the whole “statistical significance” thing above.

What does that mean? Well, put simply, it means we mostly focus on WordPress websites. That’s the Cliff’s Notes® version. But if you want to learn more, keep reading. If you’ve visited our page on web design, you’ve already read our design philosophy. Since we like symmetry and consistency, you can read our corresponding set of web development values below:

Open Source: we believe in open source, entirely, completely, and utterly. Not just for software: for operating systems, frameworks, content management systems, the blockchain concept, political systems, and almost anything else that can be improved by the world. For web development specifically, though, that means we use things like Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and, as mentioned above, WordPress. It’s better for you, the client; it’s better for us, the developers; and it’s better for the world.

We’ll Figure It Out: sometimes we get strange requests out of the ordinary. Like the university that asked us if we could upgrade their website that was running on a codebase that used an 8-year old version of CodeIgniter. Or the online-auction company that had an extremely old platform built in Adobe® ColdFusion by Russian developers (no joke!). Our answer is an enthusiastic “Uhh, we’ve never worked with that exact thing before, but we’ll figure it out.” We did. And we do. We’ll figure it out.