Skip to content
Menu
  • Web Design Business
  • Web design Fundalmentals
City Kitty Design

How to hire a GREAT Website Designer or Developer. Don’t make a mistake

Posted on June 6, 2017


How to hire a GREAT Website Designer or Developer. Don’t make a mistake
http://OmniDigitalAdvice.com

Choosing a website developer and/or designer is an important and difficult decision. So much rides on your website namely your sales and your brand. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and looking for advice to make an informed decision then don’t worry. We are going to explain what to look for and what to avoid when it comes to hiring a web developer/designer.

Hiring a great designer and developer is about finding the right fit for your business. We can help you find the right people for the job using our experience and our network of tried, tested and recommended developers/designers. Just contact us on http://contact@omniappstudios.com

The main things to look for include:
A strong portfolio
Someone that understands what you need
Someone that understands your business or industry
Good communication
Enough capacity to commit to your project
A strategy to measure effectiveness
The knowledge and use of best practices
A development plan with deadlines and reporting periods
A good warranty and support offer

Make sure you shop around and get different opinions from different website designers. By exploring the market you can make a better informed decision when hiring.

Clearly define the purpose of the website so you are clear on the strategy. Your website is a form of marketing so it’s an investment not an expense. Check their understanding of your business, do they understand the problems you are trying to solve?

If you want to find great designers and developers you need to realise that they will be in high demand. They often aren’t looking for jobs because so many people are offering them work. To find these types of people a good place to go is to technical meetups. Check Facebook and Meetup.com for meetups like these in your area. Remember to clearly define what you need from your site and be enthusiastic about it. You want to capture a good designer’s attention with a promising project.

You should develop a plan to measure effectiveness of the website. You will need to know if it’s working and what elements work best. With this knowledge you can tweak and refine your site. Make sure you install tracking codes for analytical software like Google Analytic, Google Webmaster Tools and Inspeclet. Monitor the work you are getting and how you got it. Ask your customers how they found you and track the conversions you get from visitors to your site. For more information about this please ask me.

Set expectations with your website designer so there are minimal mismatched of expectations and misunderstandings. Good communication will help this. Have regular reporting meeting and updates. Be open to advice from your website developer and give constructive feedback. You don’t want to cause resentment by being too brutal in your criticism of their work. Give them one or two chances to get things right until you decide they are doing a terrible job. Many times what you perceive as wrong might be because you communicated what you wanted poorly.

Find out how busy your website designer/developer is and find out upfront what level of service will you get. Are they spreading themselves too thin on other projects? Will they offer a good warranty period and support rate? How often can you contact them? Bare in mind how many people in the web team. If someone is sick or on leave do they have backup?

Make sure you document your requirements adequately so that website developers and designers can estimating costs effectively. See this video for information on requirement gathering. Getting the requirements right will prevent scope creep. If there are features you need that weren’t originally agreed upon you can mark them down for phase 2 of your site. Do the minimum needed to make the site perform its purpose and if it shows promise invest in upgrades. http://www.omnidigitaladvice.com/video/how-to-gather-requirements-correctly_41

Remember to think about the content management system (CMS). Make sure it’s designed to allow you to make predictable refinement tweaks. You don’t want to be asking your website developer to make changes all the time. The more you can do in a CMS the cheaper it will be although it will cost you some time to make the updates yourself.

Questions to ask…

What version control system do you use, why and what did you compare it to? Using best practice, know there are multiple choices and in comparing they looked at strengths and weaknesses and chose one showing logical reasoning. If they can explain by explaining complex technical stuff to you so you can understand then you can communicate effectively.

Ask what blogs they follow and what groups they are members of. If they care about their craft they will be reading and discussing it with other designers/developers. They should also be using best practices like peer review, version control and acceptance tests.

Recent Posts

  • How to Hire a Web Designer: 5 Steps
  • 5 Benefits Of Hiring Professional Web Design Companies
  • 8 tips for hiring a Web designer for your business
  • Top 5 Tips for Choosing a Web Designer
  • 7 Qualities of a Great Website

RSS Web Design News

  • How Plugins Enhance The WYSIWYG Editing Experience (Sponsored) August 2, 2022
    WYSIWYG editors are one of the core components of any content management system (CMS). A well-coded, feature-filled WYSIWYG HTML editor can distinguish between a CMS users love and one they can’t stand.  While all WYSIWYG editors have a set of basic functionality, the power of plugins enhances the editing experience. Plugins allow WYSIWYG editors to […]
  • JavaScript Event.defaultPrevented July 27, 2022
    Whether you started with the old on_____ property or addEventListener, you know that events drive user experiences in modern JavaScript. If you’ve worked with events, you know that preventDefault() and stopPropagation() are frequently used to handle events. One thing you probably didn’t know: there’s a defaultPrevented proptery on events! Consider the following block of code: […]
  • 7 Ways to Optimize Performance for Your WordPress Site (Sponsored) July 18, 2022
    The vast majority of blogs, news websites, and information websites run on WordPress. While the WordPress developer team and community do their best to ensure wordPress is performant, there are a number of practices you can implement to keep your site blazing fast. Let’s look at some of them! Use Cloudinary WordPress Plugin for Media […]
  • How to Get Extension Manifest Information July 10, 2022
    Working on a web extension can be kinda wild — on one side you’re essentially just coding a website, on the other side you’re limited to what the browser says you can do in the extension execution environment. One change in that environment is coming January 2023 — pushing extensions to move to manifest version […]
  • How to Reverse an Animated GIF June 23, 2022
    Modifying visual media via code has always been a fascination of mine. Probably because I’m not a designer and I tend to stick to what I’m good at. One visual effect I love is seeing video reversed — it provides a sometimes hilarious perspective on a given event. Take this reversed water effect for example: […]
  • CSS :optional May 22, 2022
    A decade ago HTML and CSS added the ability to, at least signal, validation of form fields. The required attribute helped inform users which fields were required, while pattern allowed developers to provide a regular expression to match against an ‘s value. Targeting required fields and validation values with just CSS and HTML was very […]
  • Get a Random Array Item with JavaScript May 9, 2022
    JavaScript Arrays are probably my favorite primitive in JavaScript. You can do all sorts of awesome things with arrays: get unique values, clone them, empty them, etc. What about getting a random value from an array? To get a random item from an array, you can employ Math.random: const arr = [ "one", "two", "three", […]
  • Legacy String Methods for Generating HTML April 26, 2022
    I’m always really excited to see new methods on JavaScript primitives. These additions are acknowledgement that the language needs to evolve and that we’re doing exciting new things. That being said, I somehow just discovered some legacy String methods that you probably shouldn’t use but have existed forever. Let’s take a look! These legacy string […]
  • Interview with an Intiface Haptics Engineer April 25, 2022
    I was recently re-reading my Interview with a PornHub Web Developer and one bit I started thinking about was the VR question and the idea of making users not just see but feel` something. The haptic feedback of VR games is what really sets them apart from your standard PC or console game. So when […]
  • Input valueAsNumber April 5, 2022
    Every once in a while I learn about a JavaScript property that I wish I had known about years earlier — valueAsNumber is one of them. The valueAsNumber provides the value of an input[type=number] as a Number type, instead of the traditional string representation when you get the value: /* Assuming an
©2022 City Kitty Design