Published on August 2nd, 2017 | by Guest

How to Hit the Bull’s Eye in Choosing a Developer for Your Website

The choice of the mobile developers is quite troublesome and energy-consuming, especially if you do it for the first time.

How to no lay an egg? What are the factors to consider and questions to ask? How to choose the best company out of a few dozens of options? Find the answers to these and other relevant questions below.

#1 Portfolio

The first thing you will do is check the potential candidate’s portfolio. Pay attention to:

The number of works. It shows the overall experience of the developer. A proficient programmer must deal not only with informational websites but also online stores, catalogs, etc. Check whether you fall within the scope of the performer’s capabilities.
References. Each work should contain not just an illustration and description but also a link to the created website. Pass by these links to make sure that the portfolio contains working sites.
Design. This is the most difficult criterion to assess because most clients tend to adjust the appearance of the site, from colors to elements. That’s why it makes sense to evaluate the design regarding its relevance without touching other aspects.

#2 Freelancers vs. Studios/Companies

In search of a developer, you will inevitably come across two categories of performers: freelancers and teams. The latter have some advantages like invoiced payments, generally accepted working days and hours, compliance with deadlines, etc.

In contrast, when working with a freelancer, everything is tied to one person, which makes you dependent on the developer. Often freelancers are students who want to earn extra money but have neither necessary experience nor knowledge.

Although freelance services of are cheaper, think twice whether the game worth the candle.

#3 Reviews

Whether you like it or not, reviews can’t give you a 100% guarantee of excellent service, and this criterion is very controversial! In many cases, feedback is impossible to check, and the big question is whether positive and negative feedback is worth considering…

#4 Personal Qualities

Pay attention to the developer’s speech, manners, and ability to listen. The most common misconception is that all programmers look sloppy and untidy. That’s not true. Whether you talk to a freelancer or a representative of a company, you deal with a businessperson who sells skills and experience. Do not trust clichés! Also, pay attention to the speed of response to your request.

#5 Questions to Ask

Domain and hosting. Ideally, you should buy both under the guidance of the developer, because not all hosting companies provide high-quality service. Without special knowledge and experience in this area, you risk purchasing something that won’t meet your expectations.
Price. Clarify whether the price is final and whether the additional costs may be needed.
Website optimization. This is a preparatory work for the website promotion on the Internet. The site code should contain keywords and headings. Although the developer is not obliged to optimize the website, he must provide you with that option.
CMS. Ask the developer whether you’ll be able to edit the information on your site by yourself. When you are offered a site with a limited number of pages, it means the website won’t contain CMS, and you will need to pay for any changes.
Statistics of visits. This is not necessary, but if you care about how many people visits your resource and which pages are the read most often, then you need some tool for obtaining such statistics. The most common one is Google Analytics.

When choosing a company that you are ready to entrust to develop a website or update an existing one, it is especially important to determine what tasks the corporate website will solve. If you need a business card website, there’s no reason to hire a famous digital agency. If you sell one unique product, you can limit yourself (at least at the first stage) to a high-quality and memorable landing page, and there are developers specializing in LPs!

However, there is no doubt that most websites are tools for sales and attracting customers. Ideally, your site should become a part of a unified marketing strategy, that is, it should be optimized for solving key business tasks from the very beginning. From this point of view, the most effective contractor will be a marketing agency able to analyze the existing errors and shortcomings, as well as optimize the website for a better indexation by search engines.

Regardless of how beautiful the design is, the basis of success is usability and content. Based on the users’ behavior (who are they, where they come from, what they want to see, etc.), a proficient developer can determine how to interact with users so that to turn them into buyers. A website designed with these factors in mind can and most likely will become an independent tool to increase profits!

Author bio:

Lucy Adams is an essay writer and blogger. She’s a generalist who never refuses to cover intriguing topics. Feel free to contact Lucy at [email protected] and share your brilliant ideas. Lucy’s guest posts are free, so please don’t miss an opportunity to add some value to your blog.

Tags: bull's eye, choosing, developer, hit, how to, website