Developing websites can be a tedious task, especially when you’re learning to develop the sites yourself. Recently, I’ve been doing just this. The reason it’s taken me so long to actually learn how to code is because there is an amazing variety of languages and tools out there. Especially if you’re using WordPress, which a significant number of people do.
As the web has become more accessible, it has become more common to build websites using pre-build templates and commercial themes. There are entire careers built around WordPress that don’t require any sort of skill in coding. Templates and web builders have become so advance that it genuinely does question the need of bespoke coding. Why code when you can use the Divi builder, Visual Composer, PageCloud or Squarespace to achieve exactly what you want, in a nice user-friendly package?
Well, that’s where coffee comes into it.
I’m a passionate coffee drinker, from roast to brew I love the entire process. I love it so much that I’ve started a coffee company with an old friend of mine who has become our chief roaster.
The process of roasting coffee is quite scientific, not ‘arty’. You have to be super slick. From the moment you pour those ethically sourced green beans into your roasting chamber, you’re up against every element. Your number one goal is to contain as much quality as possible.
At every stage during your roast; roasting the beans, cooling the beans, packaging the beans and so on, the quality of the roast had been impacted and loses and percentage of quality you just can’t get back. So, you have to absolutely nail the process, be slick, cleaver and thought through in your approach.
Do you see the similarities in coffee and coding?
In order to build the most optimized website possible, you need to code it from the ground up. Compromising the quality of your website just because it’s easier to use a template is lazy and less effective!
Just like roasting coffee, at every stage of building your website, you need to assess its optimization. Have you used more than one H1 tag? Have you put alt descriptions in the images you’ve placed? How clean is the code you’re writing? How fast does your site perform? And so on.
My conclusion is that using templates can often create a cloud over what you’re trying to achieve. You see, when you’re developing your website from the ground up, coding it yourself means you know exactly what’s going into it. You can assess every page easily, if something breaks, you know where to go to fix it, if something is slow, you know why.
To find out more about delicious coffee that helps to end modern-day slavery, go to Seven Districts Coffee.
