Component Development Guide > Development Workflow

Plan

Before you start coding, it is important to have a plan. Even if you already have a working web application and are just looking to inject that existing functionality into a component so it can be used in Flite ads, there are still a lot of decisions to be made. Two key questions that you will need to answer are:

What functionality should the component include? An ad has limited real estate, and the typical ad viewer has a very limited attention span. An application that’s very popular as a full-fledged web app may not be appealing inside a 300x250 ad if it is too complex. You may want to strip out some of the non-essential features and limit the component’s workflow to as few screens as possible. Understanding exactly what your component will and will not do is a crucial part of the planning process.

Which features of the component will advertisers be able to adjust, and which will be hard-wired? It’s good to build a lot of flexibility into your component, and give advertisers a high degree of control over what the component will look like and how it will behave. On the other hand, having too many moving parts can get very confusing and turn customers away from the component. Planning which features will be adjustable via configuration parameters and which will be hard-wired is one of the most important decisions you will have to make in the planning stage, and will play a key role in your component’s eventual success.

There are many other aspects to planning your component. Please read the Guidelines and Best Practices section for more tips about how to plan and build a best-of-breed component.