Building and Planning of a Web-Application [closed]

Question

Good morning everyone,

I hope I'm not posting this in the wrong place; I've been programming web projects, mostly in MVC and ASP.NET for consulting companies, but I always pick-up unfinished projects, so I gotta say, my experience in web development isn't as good as I'd like it to be. To improve my experience, I decided to accept building a project for a veterinarian clinic and I'm going to build the project in MVC. There are a few things I'd like to know to make my project well structured and to avoid feeling lost in the process because I don't have as much time to research as I'd like to. So the main questions I'd like to ask are:

• When beginning a new project, where should I begin? Making the stylesheets? Should I go straight for the code? If I make some planning, how should I go about it then?

• When building up the Media folder in my project, if I decide I'll use
  jQuery and the like, what files
  should I really get? What's the best way to implement jQuery in a MVC
  project without having to mention it in every page?

• To make a sort of planning for
  myself, complete with deadlines I
  have to respect, what structure
  should I use?

• Well, I'm not good at designing at
  all, and I often have to rely on
  other people's CSS to make things
  look decent, so how could I use this project to improve that and still
  make it look good?

I hope we can all share some experience in the matter at hand and make this topic help others who might be feeling the same weaknesses as I do.

Answer 1

• Try to find a framework that suits your needs. If you want reusability, make sure you learn/understand the concept of the MVC pattern (OOP). I personally work with Zend-Framework which has a very big community.

  (However, a good practice is building your own framework. Look at other frameworks and learn about the pro's and cons.)

• Every project starts with an UML design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language

• Don't try to invent the wheel again, for example: learn/play with the 960 css grid http://960.gs, jQuery and different database-types.

• Documentate everything!

• Test everything http://simpletest.org

• use subversion for easy access of previous versions of your project http://subversion.net

• book tip: http://www.amazon.com/Communicating-Design-Developing-Documentation-Planning/dp/0321392353

When you start building your code I suggest you start with register, login and authentication. After that: Internationalization and localization (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization)

Then create your CRUD's and so on..

EDIT: Some other resources you might wanna have a look at:

• Requirements gathering
• Planning
• Object-oriented design and Design Patterns
• Configuration management
• Programming (or Coding)
• Web design and Usability
• Documentation
• Software testing
• Web application security

Good luck!!