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When building anything on the web, including things as basic as a website or as complicated as a bigger web application, you need to decide how you’re going to build it. Part of the “how” of building anything is deciding what framework or language you’re going to use. This is where the Django Framework comes in. Here at Red Crow Digital, we love building web applications in Django. There are a lot of choices out there in terms of frameworks and languages, but we find ourselves always coming back to Django for the majority of our projects.

If you’re looking to develop a new website for your business, you’ve probably been doing a bit of research on website development agencies, what content management system (CMS) to use, and maybe even considered building the site in house. If you’re here on this blog article, you’re probably in the phase of researching what CMS to use.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is important for all websites. If you have built a beautiful new website, you need it to be found by popular search engines like Google and Bing, and that’s what SEO does: optimise a website so it’s better found by search engines and therefore more easily found by potential customers.

WordPress must be the most popular CMS for a reason, right? But does this make WordPress the “best” CMS? As with everything, the “best” is relative. WordPress is very good for a lot of use cases, but defaulting to “let’s just use WordPress” may not be the best decision for your business’ website. Yes, if you need a quick website for your startup, WordPress may be a good choice to get rolling quickly, but it’s something you may want to change in the future.

Musica Viva is the largest presenter of chamber music in the world, a nationally renowned company with offices in every Australian state and territory, reaching approximately 360,000 people directly every year. Red Crow Digital were engaged by Musica Viva to begin planning a new and exciting web presence including seamless integration with globally recognised CRM and ticketing software Tessitura.

So you have a new website or an existing website. You want to make sure it’s performing at its best, but how do you do that? When we’re talking about website performance, we’re talking about a couple different things. We’re talking about speed and user behaviour. Afterall, you can have a great website that’s optimised for SEO with tons of traffic potential, but if the site is slow and users are bouncing, your great website isn’t reaching its full potential.

If your business is using multiple pieces of specialised software, you’ve probably run into the problem of sharing data between all your different applications. The great thing about specialised software is that it does a few things very well. However, this also means that there’s a lot a specific piece of software can’t do. And this makes sense. We use software to do a task, and do it easily and efficiently. If you’re looking for an application that does everything, you run into a “Jack of all trades, master of none” scenario and wind up with something that mostly works, but not as well as it can. Software is just a tool and, just like with physical tools, you need the right tool for the job. You wouldn’t use a hammer to saw a piece of wood in half.

When building a mobile application for your business, one of the big decisions is development approach. While development approach is a relatively broad topic and developing a mobile application is a pretty complex endeavour, here we’re talking about the choice to develop a mobile application natively or to go with a cross-platform approach. Deciding on native development or cross-platform development isn’t an easy decision. There are pros and cons to each approach, and making the right decision is very dependent on what the mobile app is, what the market is, and more.

The team from Red Crow Digital recently attended DjangoConAu! Not only did we all learn a lot, we had great fun too. It’s no secret that we here at Red Crow Digital love Django, so we jumped at the chance to attend a whole day dedicated to it. While writing an article on everything we learned and all the talks we attended would be far too long, there were some definite highlights. So if you want to see what it’s like being a Django developer or better understand what we do on a day to day basis, read on and find out.