Website Designers and Developers can be an extension to your marketing and branding team since these professionals have a significant amount of influence over how your website looks and functions.
Choosing an individual freelancer or agency to do design or development work should include considering things like specific platform experience, responsiveness, rate and billing practices, and even the tool set the service provider will use to communicate or manage requests.
In this article, you’ll find a few considerations for choosing a designer or developer.
1. Platform Experience
Even if you’re just starting out in e-commerce, it is probably a good idea to choose an e-commerce platform before choosing a professional designer or developer.
Not all ecommerce platforms are the same. As an example there are significant differences between opening and managing an online retail site built on Magento or on Volusion. For some online retail businesses, Magento will be a much smarter choice, while other ecommerce merchants will almost certainly be better served with Volusion or Shopify. All of these are good ecommerce platforms, but some do certain things better than others.
Once you have chosen an ecommerce platform seek out a developer, designer, or agency that has specific platform experience. While almost any good PHP developer could work on a Magento site, it might take that developer a significant amount of time to become familiar with the platform especially if he has not worked with Magento before. It would not be unreasonable that even a seasoned developer would need something like 40 hours or more, just to become familiar enough with Magento to successfully write an extension.
Even once a developer has worked with a platform it can take time to become familiar with a specific theme or implementation. Often this is 10 hours or more.
2. Responsiveness
Some development or design firms are good about getting back to you immediately, while others — often individual freelancers — almost certainly won’t be.
In some cases, this might not matter much. Imagine a designer creating a new graphic design for a future site update. If that designer doesn’t respond immediately, it is most certainly not a big deal. But if your site is suddenly broken and shoppers cannot complete their orders, you need a development partner that is available in a moment’s notice.
3. Hourly Rates and Billing
Hourly rates vary greatly for designers and developers; be certain to get a few quotes.
If you’re hiring a service provider for a set number of hours, you’ll want to be able to carry over any leftover hours. As an example, if you contract for 20 hours a month, you should regularly pay for those twenty hours. If, however, in one month you only use 15 hours, you should have 25 hours available in the next month. You’ll still pay the same each month. Don’t expect a discount, but you should be able to carry those hours over. You will also want the option to be able to purchase additional hours in a given month.
Finally, find out how you will be billed for project management hours. If you have contracted for 20 hours of work it may be that case that as many as 4 or 5 of those hours will be consumed in project management time that is time spent speaking to you, reading your emails, and communicating with other design or development team members. Some firms will charge you for these hours just like any other time, some firms will charge a lower rate, and still other firms won’t charge specifically for project management.
4. Tool Set
Often a developer, designer, or agency will have a particular set of software tools used to communicate questions, share project related information, or provide status updates. This tool set will be something that you’ll use very often. Make sure that it works for you.
As a rule try to avoid ticket based systems. These are acceptable for, say, hosting providers. But your relationship with a designer or developer should be more intimate.
Also look for solutions that will allow you to share video or audio files with the developer or designer since these are always better than written descriptions.
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