If you've locked yourself away in a dark room, subsisting on coffee and pizza while you develop the website that's going to allow your business or idea to revolutionize the world, then stop right now, open the curtains, take a break and read this.

First off, it's likely that whatever your trying to design or create has already been done in one form or another - even if your application is completely unique, the vast majority of your website will still have attributes that are common to other websites. For example, it may still need to manage users, have an about us page and so on.

Before you write a single line of code, it's far more valuable to research what can be done with the minimum amount of cost. When I say cost, I actually mean any combination of time, effort, or monetary cost - in other words, the actual cost to you as a person.

What you'll find is that it's far more efficient to:

Instead of slaving away re-inventing the wheel, you are able to focus specifically on anything that is truly unique, safe in the knowledge that the rest of your prebuilt website is going to do a bang-up job.

Ta-dah...