15 Things to Consider When Hiring a Web Development Company

 Web development companies are mushrooming everywhere and claiming big. The need for web development is growing despite stalwart from mobile applications. Mobile-friendly websites have created a new audience that loves mobile browsing only.

Therefore, a charm for web development among the various business communities is intact and even growing thanks to preferences of the audience that requires the web as well as a mobile entity both to accomplish buying lifecycle.

Marketers are pitching the ground by offering real-time and location-based incentives to leverage mobile audiences with full capacities. It again compels businesses to have high-tech websites, and mobile apps accompanied by the latest technologies, features, and functionality to gain an edge over the competition.

Thus, businesses are rushing to knock the doors of a number of prestigious web and mobile development companies, particularly offshore companies, which can avail benefits of outsourcing without compromising on quality delivery.

Unfortunately, everybody is not lucky enough that they have sweet relationships with such web development agencies in the outsourcing industry. They have to pass through a long process to make the right selection and establish a rapport with it.

To ease your life, we have decided to give some useful tips or consider things in this regard. Let’s check some 15 things, if not more

Tip No.1: Know Your Requirements First at Tech Point of View

Differentiating a website from a web application for a business is a tough job. Similarly, they hardly recognize a dynamic website or web portal from a static website. To do so, you have to go to the web and find out some informative blogs like this one that can help to improve your tech knowledge.

The best way is to converse with more than one web development company and place your needs to the experts. They probably help you to define your website category. Besides these, you should know that:

• What degree of customization is essential for your project?
• Which stages are required in the web development project?
• Know your competitors and what they did?
• What is your budget?

Based on it, you can search a few right firms for you and take an in-depth interview with their developers for a fixed rate project or hire web developers through hiring resources packages.

Know what you want first so that you can find out the right provider for it.

Tip No.2: Cross Check References

The general perception of people seeking software development services is to check the portfolio of the company or developer in question. Unfortunately, a website or a web application depicted in a portfolio hardly answers all queries of a client. For instance,

• Which developers and designers have participated in the project and the same team is available for your project
• Whether project delivered on-time or not
• Whether project accomplished within budget or not
• What is attitude of the team & company with clients regarding project management, conversations, and reporting
• How the team or company behaves once the project finished or payment had done, and bugs or maintenance issues arising, i.e. post development behavior
• How long the web development companies have retained their talents for long and kept reputations in the market intact

To obtain the answers to the questions above, you need to come directly into the contacts of clients who already benefited from the services of the said company or the team.

Fortunately, the software development industry has provisions to provide valid references of their previous clients upon the request and willingness of those clienteles to come into contact with upcoming clients.

You can leverage cross-reference checking and know everything regarding your selected company from the previous clients directly.

Tip No.3: Take Interviews of Your Developers

When you opt to hire a web developer or a team of designers and developers for your web development project, web development companies, by rules, provide you profile links or CV of web developers going to assign you.

It is good to know educational qualifications and a list of projects they have done, but the main thing is to know their creativity and gauge their practical expertise to deal with the complexities of your project.

Therefore, the best way is either video conference or individual visual chats. Direct conversations with your team may assure you regarding their conversational abilities and provide you opportunities to know their skills with some practical tests if you are able to carry them.

Tip No.4: Ask for Privacy and Security Policies

Each business has some confidential data and concerns for personal info securities. Many software development projects require those confidential data and dive deeper into the business process.

The threats to reveal business secrets looming when those open to unknown third parties like offshore/onshore web development companies passing through the business analytic process in the course to gather business and personal data.

Therefore, NDA (Non-Discloser Agreement) signing like the legal and moral process is prevailing in the software development industry and almost all web development agencies. It ensures your data confidentiality and privacy as the best policy.

For the sake of digital data security, web development companies always use the local server as a development server, and at the time of deployment web, developers take the help of hosting providers to run Internet-based development servers to test and get approvals of clients.

Once your website is published, your data remains with web development companies, and it demands physical to virtual security. You can mention those in NDA and ask a web development firm regarding it.

In short, NDA signing with complete provisions is an ideal way.

Tip No.5: Ask for Source Ownership

Many frustrated clients approach our support team asking for help to make small changes on their websites, which they have developed with some notorious web development firms keeping source code ownership with them and refraining provide post-development supports for some dirty reasons.

What our support team can help them without access to the source code of their websites or web applications? If you wish to save yourself from such horrible and devastating consequences, you must ask for source code ownership and authenticate access.

Today majority of web programming taking place in open source technologies/languages, so there is no reason to make any excuse regarding source code access for a web developer.

Therefore, you must confirm that how source code authentication is provided with required access credentials including source file access, hosting account access, backend access, and so forth.

Upfront clarifications are the best policy for you, as smart and aware clients.

Tip No.6: Know How Many Tasks Your Web Development Company Accomplish In-house

There are myriads of technologies, tools, and resources involved in web design and web development. It is natural that all web design & development companies hardly afford to hire in-house talents for those all and invest in costly infrastructure.

Therefore, smart web development companies keep their expertise in particular niches or niches and leave other tasks to others. To keep their loyal customer base intact, they outsource or subcontract some selected tasks of a web development project to others in their group.

In such conditions, the best way is to ask your company directly with the required politeness and tactfulness regarding outsourcing of the critical tasks of your project. However, the best way is to award the project to the company, which has all the required talents, tools, technologies, and infrastructure to support a collaborative and conductive web development environment.

Thus, you must opt for a company that can accomplish all web development tasks in-house.

Tip No.7: Ask for Expertise & Experiences

Just like a company, a web developer never acquire expertise in all niches because learning different technologies and obtaining mastery is costly in many respect and all developers can’t afford it.

Therefore, developers stay in selected and relevant niches when skill set development is in question. Those experts are capable of delivering high quality, show flexibility, and scalability in your projects.

Thus, it is imperative that you inquire regarding skill sets available in your selected web development companies and match them with your project requirements.

Another important consideration in selection is the experiences of the talents, the more experienced and seasoned developers you find in the company; it may prove the best place for your projects and long-term relationships.

Tip No.8: Ask for Project Management

Client satisfaction, client-centric designing & development, client-centric approaches are cloying words and capable enough to tempt clients to work with such companies. Unfortunately, in real-world experiences, things are the opposite, and you can reveal it during your cross-checking of references and testimonials.

The majority of web development companies in the outsourcing arena are delivering false claims and end up with mediocre work with annoyed or unsatisfied clients. Based on previous experiences, we can say that it is project management, managers, team leaders, and finally, developers/designers are responsible for it.

Therefore, reputed web development agencies always focus on providing the best client experiences using the latest project management software and training project managers with best project management practices.

They allow clients to participate in project activities through their project management software where clients can freely interact with the entire team and provide their valuable suggestions, feedback and required a resource in real-time to encourage the creativity of the development team and speed up the project.

Apropos to it, trained project managers guide clients properly and save them from indulging in technical jargon.

Tip No.9: Ask for Your Business & Target Audience Understandings

Tip No.9: Ask for Your Business & Target Audience Understandings

Each business is unique and operating with unique processes for a unique audience. Uniqueness is one of the secrets of success. Therefore, meeting needs for uniqueness lead web development project to customization where custom features, functionality, and interactions can address.

If your web development agency lacks the knack to understand the unique needs and audience of your business, your website or web application may fail to meet your business goals. In due course, web development companies hire business analysts with some special qualifications and traits to understand business requirements.

Check whether your web development team consisting of business analysts with desired expertise and experiences.

Tip No.10: Ask for Website Security

With the increased user base, the world of the Internet is becoming a lucrative place for antisocial, mischievous, and malicious elements who are always in search of victims to accomplish their bad intentions.

They are not ordinary people, but computer experts are known as hackers in colloquial terms on the web. They can harm your small to big online identity, just not to steal your valuable data or personal info of your audience, but also make your website an anchor point to spread viruses and malware to harm the entire community of the web.

Therefore, ask your web development team regarding security measures, security standards, and security technologies/tools they know and where they have implemented.

Know the security expertise of your web developer team and security planning for your project upfront.

Tip No.11: Ask for Website Deployment Expertise

Website deployment means selecting the right host and carry the website publication process by following standard practices. There are various hosting options such as web server hosting and cloud hosting. Selection of server demands knowledge of pros & cons of shared hosting, virtual private hosting, and dedicated hosting.

If you have the right Website Development Company at hand, you can get righteous guidance.

Just discuss with your web design team what kind of hosting solution they prefer for your website or web application.

Tip No.12: Ask for Website Support, Maintenance, & Upgrade Provisions

Just the publication of your website, the role of your web programming agency is not ending. Instead, it begins to stay for longer. A live website may have bugs with the pace of time. It may have compatibility issues with the advent of web technologies and tools.

Your business may evolve and scale further thanks to your website, and you need to address several issues with that growth. For example, increased traffic, demand for personalization, burgeoning databases, disruption in interaction, disturbance in dynamic updates, hosting-related issues, downtimes, performance regression, marketing-related issues, SEO issues, and so many inline.

To tackle all, you need a team of web designers, programmers, QA developers, UX developers, and Internet marketers. The most important thing is a point of contact that can respond your any query at any time and from any device.

It is better, you ask regarding free and paid supports, maintenance and upgrade service packages, and anything beyond, that can keep you with that web development team to foster a long-term relationship.

Tip No.13: Ask for Website Marketing Expertise & Packages

Suppose you have started a brick-and-mortar store. What do you have to do to grow your business? You must broadcast that you have opened the shop and the shop are selling something that interests you. Otherwise, none may come, except passerby who can see your shop and read your board.

The same is true for the Internet business. You should apply all Internet marketing principles and leverage technologies, tools, and tweaks to spread your words across your targeted audience and prospective customers to grow your business. It is termed Internet marketing, and it consists of organic SEO, social media marketing, and paid marketing including PPC and Internet advertising.

If your web development company is offering all and can develop SEO-friendly websites, the best way is to hire it because technical SEO has a big role and it begins with the website development process.

Ask your web development company whether it offers marketing services and what the packages are.

Tip No.14: Take Final Cost Estimation Along With Complete Documentation

We know quality always comes with a price. Web development companies are hiring talents at a high salary or rates per hour. If they hire mediocre developers, the outcome should be mediocre.

The same is true for clients who are seeking high-quality results. They must pay for whatever they get. However, you can do comparative shopping here if you are tech-savvy enough and know web development technologies enough to manage your project with or without the help of a technical advocate.

First up, you should ask for ballpark estimation documents, listing all major tasks, from all your selected companies. Based on it start a dialog with very few selected companies and ask for detailed estimation with in-depth estimation along with payment terms, methods, and timeline.
It may help you to select the most suitable one to make an informed decision based on those documents. Finalize the project and sign NDA to start it. Bravo, you had done!

Costing is vital to take project decisions so never ignore it.

Tip No.15: Hire a Technical Advocate for You

It is true that without detailed knowledge of technicality, you may face a hard time selecting The Best Web Development Company and even manage the project with smooth sailing.

Therefore, our advice is to hire a technical advocate that can act or help you on technical issues right from the selection process for the web development team and managing projects on behalf of you to effectively deal with technocrats team leaders and project managers.

Hiring a technical advocate may prove worth when you are yourself is a non-tech project manager.

Conclusion

With these insights, we know that selection of a suitable web development company is daunting and demanding tech expertise in due course.

However, you can hire a tech advocate for you and sail this tide easily.
It is true that hiring one additional tech is also costly and some reputed companies like Perception System offer free Web Development Consultancy Services and devote highly expert and experienced web developers for the same purpose.

You can take benefits of free consultants and also leverage the technical talents available at Perception System to create high-end web development projects for you at highly affordable and competitive rates. Just come into contact with our team and know more in this regard.