8 Things to Know Before Hiring a Web Developer

Last week I was brought into a project for my wife’s boss, a local dentist, who wanted to freshen up his existing site. I was glad to offer my services for free, as I have had more than one dentist visit that was “on the house.” So I sat down, eager to study his existing site and come up with a plan.

Things went from bad to worse as I learned more about his site and the company he had chosen to develop it. Frankly, I was surprised the company he used, Internet Dental Alliance, was still in business.

I’m going to list a few of thing business practices that this company uses, which should be big red flags for any of you who are looking to hire a web developer. I’ll also throw in a few extra steps you should take to make sure you’re hiring the best help you can afford.

Ask for a Portfolio

This should be one of the first things you do. Every serious web developer should be ready to offer a list of sites he/she has built in the past.

Take a close look at the sites and consider:

• The overall look of the site. Is it too busy or too plain? Are colors and images used in a way that suits the site’s purpose?
• Navigation is Intuitive and Easy to Use. Take note of the menu and see if the site has been thought through. If you can’t find a site navigation, move on to another developer.
• Pages are clearly defined. Click through a few pages and see if each is clearly marked with a heading. If you know how to view a pages source code (the HTML), check for a <h1> tag.
• All the sites have a unique look. View several of the developer’s sites to make sure each is unique. If some or all of the sites look identical (or even very similar), look for another developer or offer to pay less than normal.

Get Several Quotes

Costs associated with web development can vary widely. You may find a capable college student who’ll charge $25/hr. or a veteran developer who charges considerably more. If you’re looking to have a very basic site created with no custom programming, you should stay in the hundreds of dollars. Whenever you add a customized graphic design and/or database-driven features, you should to expect to spend a good deal more.

The more you’re willing to spend, the more you should be willing to shop around and get a few quotes. You can use this as a way to get a better idea of what your site is going to cost, as well as determine who has the best skill set to complete your project.

SEO and Best Practices

SEO, search engine optimization, is the method of designing a website so that it ranks well for its target keywords. If you run a local construction company, you want potential customers to find your site easily. Ideally, you want visitors to find your site via several web searches. “Your company name” and “construction company in your city” are just two types of searches that you would want to rank highly for.

Ranking well for a keyword (a search term or phrase) is a huge part of succeeding on the web. If your web developer is in the dark when it comes to SEO, your site cannot reach its full potential. For a second opinion or additional SEO help you may consider contacting an agency such Geary SEO to send your business down the right path.

Site Statistics

Anyone who owns a successful business can probably tell you how their business trends in any given quarter or season. The same can be said about successful websites. Site statistics give you a way to see how well your site is doing.

You can gain a lot of information about your visitors and customers simply by installing some way to track site stats. You’ll be able to trend the number of visits you get, the pages on your site that are most popular, what keywords were used to find your site, and where your visits are coming from (search engines, other sites, etc.)

Google Analytics offers a free, robust way to track your site. All you have to do is sign up, and paste in a block of code into the bottom of each web page. Your developer may help you with this, but I recommend that you get direct access to the stats. Don’t depend on your developer or host to send this information to you.

Who Owns the Domain?

The matter of domain ownership, (the magical words between the www. and .com) is something I feel strongly about. If you’re paying someone $1500 to build a site for your business, you should expect to own the associated domain, especially if that domain has your business name in it.

What some crooked web developers will do it register the domain in their name so that they own it. This is used as a strong-arm tactic to keep their customers from moving to a new web developer or host.

This is one of the ridiculous problems I ran into with the dental site. I found out that they were paying a ridiculous amount of money each month for hosting. When I directed them to inquire about moving the site to another host, they discovered that they didn’t own the domain. They would have to either start over with a new domain (search engines rank new domains very poorly) or buy the domain from the host. This is an absurd business practice. If a developer insists on registering the domain in their name, forget you ever knew them and find another developer.

Who Owns the Site’s Content?

Yet another problem my wife’s employer discovered was that all of the content (the reason people visit a site) on his site was copyrighted to the developer. When they inquired about moving to a new host, the developer pointed out that they would not be able to use the content. Yet again, they would have to start over with “nothing.”

This is an important point. Since the entire scenario deals with my wife’s employer starting over with “nothing,” the fact is that he has been paying for nothing. Basically, he hired this crook to copy some template files onto his server, change a few words to reflect a particular business name, and then populate the site with useless, duplicated content. As long as the Internet Dental Alliance continues to do business in this manner, everyone should look elsewhere. Setting up a website in this manner simply should not be an option.

Hosting Fees and Web Servers

Every website must live somewhere, and that somewhere is a web server. Web servers are expensive to purchase and maintain, and must be connected to a fast and reliable connection in order to serve up the many web sites that it may host.

Hosting fees are usually an afterthought for business owners. What you should realize is that with a web site comes another monthly or annual expense. How much you spend on hosting depends on the type of site you’re running and how much bandwidth you use.

You’ve probably discovered free hosting offered by more than a few web hosts if you’ve shopped around much.. If your site isn’t mission critical, a free host may work for you. However, if your business depends on your online presence to any degree, plan on paying for a good host. Remember, you get what you pay for. Free hosts are more likely to have downtime, capped bandwidth and file storage, and slower data transmission speeds. Some free hosts may slap you with a higher-than-normal fee for exceeding any of their pre-set limits.

Paid hosting usually offers higher quality services and products. With a good host you’ll have nearly 100% up-time, snappy load speeds, and plenty of room to grow.

A few hosting terms to look out for :

• Shared Hosting – This means your site will share the resources of a web server with many other sites. This is fine for smaller sites as long as you’re aware that slower load speeds, smaller storage, and less bandwidth are typically offered.
• Semi-Dedicated Hosting – Your site will still share the resources of a server with other sites, but the number of those other sites is significantly lower. You’re likely to get better performance with this hosting plan, but they cost more as well.
• Dedicated Hosting – You have the entire web server to yourself. This offers the most performance as all of the resources on the web server are dedicated to your site. You shouldn’t be surprised, however, that this is the most expensive option.

Who Maintains the Site?

One last point to consider is who will maintain the website once it is complete? If you’ve got a lot going on within the web side of your business, keeping your site up to date can be a full time job.

If you’re going to depend on the developer to make changes and updates to your site, work out a reasonable cost up front. Personally, I prefer to have complete control over my sites. This is done most easily with a CMS (content management system), but can be done with just a bit more effort if you’re comfortable with basic HTML and uploading files via FTP.

Good Luck!

I hope this will help those of you who are beginning the site development process. If you bring this information to the conversation with prospective developers, you’re much more likely to get the results you’re after.

If you’re looking for recommendations, you should definitely look into Simplified Sites. Simplified Sites provides web hosting and web design in Tennessee. They’re really great to work with and having the hosting and web development all together is really convenient. If you live in another area, you should still check them out. After all, the web is world wide.