How to Hire a Good Designer and Developer

Wednesday, 02 December 2009 14:27

Finding a good web designer and web developer isn’t easy. For the past 6 or 7 years I have been through two-dozen designers and a dozen or so developers. For the first few years I made a lot of mistakes when it came to choosing talented employees or contractors, but for the last few years [...]

hiring

You are probably wondering what changed, right? Well after making bad hiring decisions that cost my business partner and I over 6 figures, sooner or later you figure out what too look for and where to find talented employees.

So lets dive right in and get started with finding a good web designer.

Finding a good web designer

Currently, the best place to look for a web designer is at CSS galleries. In the future it is probably going to be Haystack, which looks promising, but they still have a lot of work ahead of them.

Good CSS galleries are very picky on what designs they showcase. Thus they typically only showcase good designs.

When you go through galleries like Unmatched Style, you’ll notice that a lot of the showcased designs aren’t the sites of web design agencies. Instead they are just random websites from the web. And in some instances at the bottom of these sites there will be a link to the web design firm that was responsible for the design.

If you happen to like a design and can’t find a link to the designer, just shoot off an email to the Webmaster and hopefully you will get a response. And if you are impatient like me, you can also do a Google search for “WEBSITE NAME web design”.

Now once you have a list of potential web design firms or individuals that you like, here is what you need to do:

Step 1: You need to figure out what you want designed. Even if you are looking for something as simple as a blog design, you need to figure out what elements you want on the page.
Step 2: Whether you are designing a corporate website or a blog, there will be content on your website. A good designer will not write your content for you, so start figuring out what message you want to convey on your website.
Step 3: Go through each designer’s portfolio and see if you like the majority of their work. Just because one of their designs is really good, it doesn’t mean that all of them are.
Step 4: After you have eliminated the mediocre designers from your list, give the rest of the designers a call and find out their availability as well as their rates.
Step 5: Before you pull the trigger and hire a designer or firm, you want to test the waters. What I mean by this is tell them what you are looking for and your project requirements. If they keep on saying O.K. to everything (especially if you have a somewhat dumb idea), you shouldn’t hire them. The last thing you want is a designer that will design what you want instead of what your customers want.
Step 6: I know you are probably anxious to get started by this step, but you have to be patient. This is the time that you want to ask for references from the designer or firm. Call companies that they previously worked with and make sure that they were happy with the finished product.
Step 7: After you have called a few of the references, you now want to test out the designer. The best way to do this is to break out your design project into pieces, such as first getting wire frames designed, then a mockup, and then a coded version with minimal features. And if that last step goes well, you can have your designer finish it up by adding all of the bells and whistles. By doing this you’ll tend to get the designer to move quicker and if you don’t like the design at least you won’t spend your entire budget.

Finding a good web developer

Finding a good web developer is similar to finding a good web designer. Most good developers are similar to any other good employee, in which they won’t be a jack-of-all-trades. So when you ask them to also design for you, or write some of your website copy, they won’t.

The sad part about finding a good developer or web development agency is that there isn’t a good place like CSS galleries to find them. You typically have to look for successful software companies and see who they use.

You’ll probably have to do a few hundred Google queries (COMPANY NAME web developer) and browse sites like LinkedIn for hours to come up with a decent list of developers. This process is going to be time consuming, but there aren’t any easy solutions yet.

Once you have a list of potential web developers that you want to hire, here is what you need to do:

Step 1: Before you even talk to any web developers you need to know what you want to build. Having an idea in your head isn’t good enough, you need to write everything down. List out every feature and ideally how you would like the software to work.
Step 2: Now that you know how to find a good web designer, you need to hire one. Before the first piece of code is written, you want to have at least a rough version of the design completed. By having this, you’ll make the developer’s job much easier because he’ll know what the user will see when using the software he has to build.
Step 3: Make sure the developers code in a software language that you like. I typically go for common languages like PHP because if you ever lose a developer you can find another PHP developer. But if you go with a uncommon coding language, you may not be able to find a replacement.
Step 4: Setup a phone call with the remaining people on your list and figure out their pricing and availability. What you’ll notice is that most developers like to charge an hourly rate for their work, but you will want to nail them down on a fixed cost. This way if they go over you won’t pay them any more money, but if they finish early they still get to keep all of the money you promised.
Step 5: Similar to finding a good web designer, you want to test the waters. If your developer is O.K. with building a feature bloated product, then he or she is probably a bad hire. There is nothing wrong with hiring someone who is opinionated.
Step 6: Before you pull the trigger you want to get a few references and make sure other companies were happy to work with them. I know most references typically say good things about employees, but you’ll have to learn to read between the lines and ask better questions.
Step 7: Now it’s time to hire the developer of your choice. But when you hire them, make sure you piece meal it and split the project up into as many small parts as possible. This way if you aren’t happy, you will be able to cut them early. And by breaking the project up into small parts you’ll be able to see the output from the developer more quickly and speed up the development process.

Conclusion

Even if you follow all of the steps I mentioned above, you’ll still make mistakes and make a bad hire every once in a while. But your chances of finding a good designer or developer should drastically be higher.

And if you get lucky, like my business partner and I, and you find some really good talent, then you should do whatever you can to keep them happy and never let them go.