Technical principles

We like to find solutions and develop sites that respond to the needs of today’s challenges. Sites that can compete with others at any level or form and be ready to work steady, fast and secure.

Although these principles are not applicable to all cases since there is a large casuistry and different types of project, they guide us to make decisions during development that lead us to a quality result. If you have doubts about any of these principles and if they may be applicable to a specific development, you can contact us.

WordPress and WooCommerce #

We use the WordPress platform because it has positioned itself as the leading content-based website creation platform. It is a free software project with a large community that has developed a large number of functionalities that in general are easily integrated into the system. The platform is very well maintained, growing with improvements, and backward compatible. It is also designed as a base to offer facilities to developers and stability for the code that is created around it.

We use WooCommerce as an e-commerce platform, this platform has had spectacular growth and its versatility and integrations make it the ideal platform for a wide variety of cases.

For everything to work well with these platforms we take into account:

  • Develop using the tools, functions, hooks, APIs and abstractions that these platforms provide.
  • Proper use of elements that add functionalities, such as plugins, choosing those that show greater support from the community, avoiding those that could create dependency and avoiding overloading the site with them.
  • Follow good development practices.
  • Proper system configuration.

Development #

We use our training and experience to develop and test development on current technologies:

  • Development on current web technologies: HTML5, CSS3, PHP8.
  • Use of open source standards, libraries and modules.
  • Tests on the latest versions of the most popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and different devices (computers, mobiles and tablets)
  • We deliver the website with all open source code and licensed to be edited later by third parties.

Security #

Any website is exposed to attacks, and in fact attacks are happening all the time. Many of these attacks are automated and go from site to site looking for vulnerabilities, where they find a vulnerability they stay. Fortunately, a well-configured WordPress system is very resistant to these attacks, in fact the Casablanca website (whitehouse.gov) has been using WordPress since 2018.

  • Configuration of included security systems (such as Salt Keys)
  • HTTPS protocol
  • Filtering of requests to the server with text strings commonly used in attacks.
  • Limitation of the number of failed connection attempts from the same IP (to avoid brute force attacks).
  • Use of data validation, sanitization and escaping functions.
  • Verification of nonces in forms.

SEO #

Search engine optimization encompasses a series of strategies for search engines to «read» and «understand» our website correctly and acquire content of interest and aligned with our objectives to show it in the search engine to potential interested parties.

We do not create content, we focus on technical SEO, which allows search engines to correctly read and understand the site.

  • Development avoiding the excessive and redundant use of HTML, JS and CSS.
  • Tags oriented to search engines and social networks (title, description, featured image, language, etc.)
  • Using alt text attributes on images and links without text.
  • Proper structure of HTML elements: Markup of header, footer, article, menu, additional elements and correct use of headers (h1, h2, etc)
  • Conscious use of internal links, avoiding large amounts of links per page.
  • Permanent links and semantic URLs
  • Sitemap and robots.txt configuration

WPO #

Site efficiency optimization encompasses a series of strategies aimed at making the site load quickly. Every day the demands in this regard are greater due to the extensive use of mobile devices, and these strategies have become very important.

When we develop we do it thinking about efficiency among other factors, we want our code to have a balance between efficiency, functionality and intelligibility.

  • Conscious use of scripts, fonts, images and videos that can be high load both in downloading and rendering.
  • Review of elements that block the initial rendering of the page.
  • Performance improvement through the use of the internal cache system and transients API.
  • Improved website loading speed using caching, minification and compression.
  • Review of the efficiency of the hosting, configuration, suggestions for improvement and / or use of CDN.

Privacy and other legal terms #

You cannot collect or use personal data without the express consent of the user. This principle emerged on the internet through European legislation, but then progressively transposed to other legislations, and this guides on how some elements of a website should work. But in addition, the legislation obliges websites, for example, to identify themselves through a legal notice.

  • Creation of pages for «Legal notice», «Privacy policy» and «Cookies policy».
  • Implementation of the cookie notice with blocking the loading of third-party scripts that may affect the privacy of the user until the user has not accepted.
  • Implementation at forms that collect personal data to check acceptance of the Privacy Policy.

Clarification: At GIGA4 we are not legal professionals. The texts of these sections and other details must be created and verified by a professional.

Website deploy #

Whether we make changes to an existing site or publish a new site, we make a deployment that minimizes the offline time of the website (if it existed previously) and we analyze the hosting and domain configuration so that everything works correctly.