Choosing a Web Developer
5 March, 2004

This articles aims to offer a guideline to help your business choose a Web Developer.

Bear in mind the following:-

"The Internet has been in popular use for less than 10 years, and 99.9% of Web Developers have less than 10 years of experience as Web Developers and the majority have less than 5 years of experience."

The Internet is advancing at a tremendous speed and it is critical that Web Developers are constantly re-evaluating and improving their methods and processes to enhance the quality of the solutions offered to your business. The following is a list of key areas that we have identified to be important to the overall website development process:-

• Web Design
• Implementation
• Applications
• Portfolio
• Project Management
• Maintenance / Support
• Freelancers
• Budgetting
• Web Design

The Web Design of your website should be carried out by the Web Developer's graphic designer.You should brief the graphic designer or the project manager on the branding/identity, corporate colours, look & feel and the contents that you wish to present on the website. (Assuming that all the corporate branding/identity are already in place.) Graphic designers will often be glad if you give them samples of your marketing brochures, advertisements, name cards, stationery, etc. because it will help them a great deal to understand your company's branding.

When presented with demo designs of how your website will look- you will normally receive the designs as as a sinel image. After reviewing the demo designs and offering clear feedback to your graphic designer, they can revert with imroved design(s). Normally after 3-4 iterations, you will have designs that you are satisfied with and are prepared to sign-off on them.

Some Web Developers will present you with designs already in a webpage format (HTML), and generally this means that they have bypassed the entire Web Design phase and have gone straight to the Implementation phase. In doing so, the overall design will invariably will be compromised. Hence, these Web Developers should be avoided.

Implementation

The implementation comprises the conversion of the signed-off designs into webpage format (HTML) and is generally carried out by HTML Programmers. Professional Web Developers do not use tools such as MS FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver or any other programs of the like to create webpages for the following reasons:-

• Webpages generated are much larger in filesize than if programmed by HTML programmer
• Compromised Browser compatilibility - which results in some browsers not being able to correctly view the webpages.
• Not scalable- the project is difficult to co-ordinate because all of the webpage produces are not standardised.
• Difficult to use the webpages for integration purposes into applications.

Upon completion of the HTML webpages, the webpages may become used for incorporation into Content Management Systems (CMS) *** and/or other applications.

*** Content Management Systems (CMS) are applications that empower users with no technical skills to update and manage the contents of their websites.

Applications

Applications refer to programs and software. There are a number of applications that we consider indispensible to websites.

- Content Management System
- Website-access Statistics Reporting
- Control Panel - to manage email accounts
- Mailing List Program

Content Management System
We believe that all Web Developers should offer your business the ability to update and manage your website yourself, which at the minimum should include the ability to add, edit and delete Products, News/Events and general information.

Website-access Statistics Reporting 
Website-access Statistics Reporting will give you a detailed report on the traffic your website has received, which are the most popular pages, what keywords users are searching on search engines (e.g. google.com, yahoo.com) to arrive at your site and demographical information about your visitors.

Control Panel - to manage email accounts
Web developers should offer you a Control Panel or tools for you to manage email accounts, setup auto-responders, setup forwarding and other hosting-related issues.

Mailing List Program
Users of your website should be able to join your mailing list through the website. Users' email addresses are subsequently managed by a Mailing List Program that allows users to opt-in and opt-out and manage their profile.

If Web Developers are having to build entire applications from scratch to meet your requirements, you should be very cautious and avoid such circumstances if possible because you will likely endure the following:-

• Higher project costs
• Longer deployment time which must also include the time for application development
• More bugs in the new application than a mature application (already used by many other users)
• Delayed project completion due to unforseen application development obstacles

Portfolio

An efficient means to assess the quality of a Web Developer's work is to evaluate their portfolio of works. You should check for the following:-

- Good Overall Design
- Web Browser Compatibility
- No broken links
- Good use of Style Sheet
- Screen resolution compatibility

The overall design of the website should be aesthetically appealing and look professional. Although, this area could be subjective and a matter of taste, there are certainly designs that can discarded as unappealing by consensus.

The website should operate well in different web browsers and different versions of web browsers which include (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, etc. ), unless it is stated clearly that the website is only designed for certain browsers.

The Web Developer of a website that contains broken links should immediately be dismissed, because they clearly do not take care in their work.

The website should always use style sheet(s) that will ensure consistency in style (font size, font colour, font face, spacing, etc.) throughout the entire website. Constant fluctuations in style between webpages generally indicate that no style sheet has been used and makes the entire website look incongruous.

Two years ago the standard screen resolution was 800 x 600 (W x H), but recently with the inundation of LCD screens, the standard screen resolution has been shifting towards 1024 x 768. Your Web Developer should be aware of the screen resolution trends and consult you to enable you to make the right decision.

Project Management

The management of the project should be co-ordinated by a Project Manager. After finalising all of the website requirements, the project manager should give you a project plan detailing the various phases of the project, a list of deliverables for each phase and a schedule of completion for each phase. The project manager will be responsible to ensure that the project adheres to the project plan and that all the deliverables are fulfilled. Some project managers will require you to sign-off at the end of each phase to confirm that all that particular phase had been completed satisfactorily.

Generally, each project is divided into 5 phases. (i) Design, (ii) Implementation, (iii) Amedments, (iv) Testing and (iv) Launch. The exact phases will vary from project to project and project manager to project manager.

Ideally, all presentations should be presented onto a project management area accessible over the Internet by authorised members of the project team. All project meetings should be minuted and the minutes should also be available in the project management area. We have found this method of project management to be the most efficient and permits any new project team members to be able to quickly ascertain project status and review all dialog between you and the Web Developer.

Maintenance / Support

It is worth noting that, the initial website deployment cost is often perceived to be the largest and only cost, but we have also found that the cost of website maintenance and management to be a significant cost. For a website to be frequented, it is necessary that the website be constantly updated and contain new information and this is often a very large task.

If your website does not have a CMS, your Web Developer will be responsible for the updating and maintenance of the website. With many of the businesses we have encountered, the majority of the dis-satisfactions in a Web Developer's service is in the maintenance and support rather than other aspects of web development.

Hence, before committing to a particular Web Developer, it would be wise for you to check co-laterals to ensure that the Web Developer offers good support and maintenance.

Freelancers

5 years ago, the vast majority of Web Developers were freelancers, qualified by basic imaging and HTML-authoring skills, and had become so to service the web needs of businesses. Today, web development requires a much broader spectrum of specialised skills from graphic design to programming to security to project management and often one single freelancer will not possess all of the necessary skills and resources to deliver an end-product that will fulfill all of your requirements.

Many of the businesses we encountered have found that the maintenance and support services offered by freelancers to be weak, perhaps due to the lack of resource to offer round the clock support. Businesses that need mission-critical tasks to be attended to with efficiency and professionalism cannot tolerate poor support and will always be forced to look elsewhere for better solutions that do offer good support.

Nonetheless, there are definitely benefits to using the services from freelance Web Developers, the key one being price. Generally, you can expect the price of web services provided by independent freelancers to be significantly lower than those from companies.

Budgetting

When budgetting for your website, note that the maintenance of the website is a very significant cost of the project and not just the initial deployment of the website. For websites that are frequented, the yearly maintenance cost ranges from 50% - 100% of the initial deployment costs- this proportion can be significantly higher for websites that are constantly incorporating new features onto their sites.

If the budget is limited and you decide to use a freelancer for your web development requirements, remember to check out their portfolio and to speak to their existing clients (if possible) and ask them about the support and maintenance services. We have seen too many businesses get very frustrated because they have received poor support from their freelance Web Developers.

Conclusion

We hope that this article will help your business to assess the quality of a Web Developer and to find a fruitful and long-term working relationship with your Web Developer.