Are you a start-up enterprise or want to rebrand your online presence in terms of website to build your brand image and interact your customers online?  Question arises if you have the extra cash to invest and build your in-house IT team which could be costly and will require IT expertise, if not,  you need to outsource your website development to a right web developer.

Your decision to hire a web developer is very crucial, important and risky. Your challenge is not only to choose a cost effective web developer but also you need to make sure, he is the right one person to create an impressive image of your business online.

You need to take few points into consideration before hiring a web developer:

1.  How and where to Hire a Web Designer:

First question arise where to find a web designer? If you have your friend or any one in your network who has got his/her website done effectively and satisfied with the developer, you may get in touch with the reference. This is one of the good way to approach as you already have a reliable reference and testimonial, if not, you want use GURU google to find the developer, you need to be very cautious about reliability of this as it is not necessary, companies or web designers coming on page one are reliable, they could have good SEO team to bring them on page one.

You may also use market places like Odesk, elance or freelancer to hire a web developer. On market place your need to check their ratings, projects done and successfully completed and also the number of project done in the technology you need.

2. Right Question, Right Technology:

One your chosen the medium, you need to decide the technology you want to use for your website if you are not sure about the technology, do google if still not sure discuss it with prospective designers.

You need to ask few questions like

–          Does he understand the concept and brand image of your business?

–          Does he have the skills to handle your project end to end right from responsive design, development and SEO? As it will help you to effectively coordinate and plan activities related to your website rather hiring people for different skills.

–          Ask him the best to technologies suited for the project and why does he want to choose one of them.

–          Will he be using open source or Microsoft technologies and why do he want to choose on of them with respect to your project.

If you are a technical person yourself you may ask more technical question like what do you use to make website responsive etc.

3.  Fixed or hourly contract?

If you are not sure about the exact amount of work to be done on the project and also number of hours if it will take, go for fixed cost projects. It will help you to avoid unnecessary over charging and misquoting in terms of hours.  If you are going for fixed project, use milestone based payment system.

If you have a reliable and already used web developer and you have frequent tasks which are small in nature, you can go for hourly contracts as it saves time used in unnecessary bidding and quoting.

4. Communicate But Avoid Over-Communication:

Effective communication is key but over communication ruins the budding reliable relationship. You can use free project management tools like freedcamp for communication and project management. Keep weekly meeting through skype and ask your web developer to respond within 24 hours TAT. Try to build a mutually benefiting relationship and treat your team with respect which will help you to get cherry on the cake.

5. Hire, Test Then Hire:

You are not running 100m race in few mins, you are getting into marathon to create your brand. Take time to Hire a web developer,  do some background research for his work, ask for references or at least review his work on Odesk, elance, linkedin if he has, it will help you in decision making to choose best out of crowd.

To minimize the risk, hire web developer for test project if you find him reliable, choose him for larger projects.

So, hiring a web developer needs to follow few steps important. It’s not only the technical expertise but also the attitude and sense of accountability in web designer gives you your expected results.  If you have requirements for web developer, go out, review the credentials, ask your intuition and hire a web developer.