The Web 2.0 Blog » Hiring a web developer? Equip yourself first and don’t lose out

Hiring a web developer? Equip yourself first and don’t lose out

Web developers are the mechanics of the 21st century. They perform some voodoo magic under the hood of your site and everything comes up rosy, right. Right? Well no, not always. There was this technique mechanics used to use to make an engine sound smoother than it really was, they used to put sawdust in the oil. Sure it used to run fine for a few miles but then BANG! It would lose most of its engine all over the side of the road. The entrepreneurs out there who are looking to hire a developer may end up with a bum deal. How can you prevent this? Read on…

There’s a problem with many web developers, they won’t do what’s best for the client. This may not be a conscious attempt at fleecing you, it may just be that they don’t know what’s best themselves. To compound this, it’s possible, just like the car engine with sawdust in it, to make a site look good while all the while covering up some major problems. There are ways developers can prevent this, but it requires work, more work than the sawdust solution. What I’m getting at here is that developers will do the absolute minimum to get that paycheck. This is why you need to set out your standards right at the beginning, that way the minimum the developer carries out is your minimum, and not theirs.

I’m going to give an example here, and it may be touching on a contentious issue but lets talk about standards. Standards are a bit of a mixed bag. What standards do you need to follow? What are the benefits? What are standards? Why is it more work to follow standards? Why does it cost more? These are all questions the average person hiring a web developer simply isn’t equipped to answer. Below are two links that every person hiring a web designer should read, they are from A List Apart and discuss redesigning the popular website slashdot using standards. Some bits are reasonably technical but overall you should get the feeling for why standards are important.

Those two articles should give you some ammunition to use in the next meeting with your designers. Question them and if their answers don’t satisfy you, then dump them. And remember, they will try and leverage their technical knowledge against you and baffle you with technical terms, don’t be intimidated by it. Your a web user, that makes you as qualified as anyone else to judge whether something works or not.

Next up on my hitlist of things to look out for is usability. This is something that you, as the client, are partially responsible for. No doubt you will work closely with the developers to establish a prototype or three and decide on the best one. This is a minefield. If you find yourself uttering the words “I’ve never seen that before” leave it, theres almost always a reason why you’ve not seen it, and the reason is mostly because it doesn’t work. The same goes for the words “and how do I..?”. If you can’t quickly figure out how to use the site, neither are your users. If your designer has to explain the navigation to you, or how you use certain functionality, throw it out. Extremely technical or complicated sites can be an exception to this rule but generally speaking, the more functionality available, the simpler it should be to use.

Remeber that there is a reason most sites follow the same basic principals, its because it works. Theres a very strong argument for not surprising your visitors, they don’t like things that work in unexpected ways. One of the problems with developers is they like to do things that interest them, that includes “flavour of the month” techniques and ideas they want to experiment with, CV fillers if you like. Keep your developers in constant check and validate their work against established norms. The best resource for this is the site of web usability guru (and no, guru is not too strong a word) Jakob Nielsen. Check out http://www.useit.com/ and see if your site comes up to scratch. Some of the theories on the site may seem foreign on first reading but its a goldmine. Usability is THE most important aspect of any site or application, full stop. Everything else is secondary, everything.

The last thing I want to touch upon is the back end of your site. You need to know what software is being used (i.e. are they using a pre-built content management system, Open Source system or commercial product?) and why it was chosen. If its widely available open source or commercially available software, did they ask you to try it out first? If not, why not? That’s fairly basic as far as client-developer relations goes. If your getting a custom script, or something that’s been kept behind closed doors then make sure its stable, secure and make sure you like it.
Just to balance this up a bit, if you do have a good developer, and there are many out there, respect their opinions. Use their experience and talent to your advantage, don’t dismiss what you don’t understand, seek clarification and if they aren’t prepared to give it, then they aren’t up to scratch.
I’ll just close by arming you with some essential tools. Use these properly and you will be well on your way to ensuring your site is up to scratch.

W3C Webpage Validator - When you get your site back run it through this. Really you should be looking for as few errors as possible. Every error is a point on which you may possibly trip up in the future. Zero errors is very easily achievable, it just takes a little more work and knowledge. Note the links on that page to other validators for RSS and CSS.
Color Blindness Checker - Its really quite basic but watch for colour clashes and low contrast sites. Bear in mind some colours appear differently to users with colour blindness.
Accessibility Checker - In many countries, for example the UK and the USA, it is a legal requirement for your site to be accessible. These often map the the WCAG guidelines and you can test them yourself using this link. Bear in mind that some common sense should be used in following the guidelines and automated tests are by no means perfect.
Oak Innovations Website Audit - This is a service which involves manually checking your site based on important criteria such as usability, design, coding and accessibility. This process can take in excess of 2 weeks, if your saying the site didn’t take that long to build, then its clear this needs to be done.

This post was written on Monday, July 24th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Accessibility , Design , Technology , Tips , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg this story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

One Response to “Hiring a web developer? Equip yourself first and don’t lose out”

Michael from Pro Blog Design Says:

August 27th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I wish that all clients would have basic knowledge like this. The trouble is that most of them just want to get in and get out. They expect you to know everything for them, including what they want…

Still, it really does make you appreciate the good clients when you get them!