New Almay Facebook Page I Worked On
On June 2, 2011, Almay, which is wholly owned by my employer, updated the What’s New section of its Facebook page, which I coded up. I spent four days developing it under the new Facebook app rules and another two dealing with an Internet Explorer bug.
The debugging couldn’t be avoided but truthfully, the development time could have been cut in half. Instead, I gave myself extra time so I could start building some best practices into my web development process, practices that really should be second nature. I did this by writing optimized website code as if I was writing it for mobile devices.
As implied, I didn’t need to do this. There were no mobile specifications from the client: of course, they’re happy if the page functions well on mobile devices, but it wasn’t deemed a “must-have.” Plus, there are a boatload of work projects on my plate right now, so maybe I should have taken a different approach.
But as I said in my last article, the ever-changing mobile landscape is making me reevaluate my own internal web developer thought process. Writing optimized web code for mobile devices forces developers to write cleaner code and manage page assets as neatly as possible, all of which makes sites load faster regardless of which device you’re viewing them on. So taking time to build up such a process isn’t a bad idea.
That being said, my next article will be a nice, long-winded one on this subject as I outline my methods and the tools I had at my disposal for this small Facebook project. I hope to write things up in an ALA type of fashion but the article’s main goal will be to share my views on *beginning to “think” like a mobile developer and creating an optimized websites for *all devices. **