5 Questions to Ask Your Business Website Developer

Before you hire your webmaster you’re going to have been shopping around. Here are 5 questions that matter and that should be a part of your interview process…
1. How many sites have you built, and can you show me 5 examples that are live?
Before you entrust someone with creating your business website they’ve had to have built 5 sites that are live by this point. The sites should be gone over with a fine tooth comb – as if they are your site that you just paid a lot of money for – because, soon – yours will be just like this. Does the person pay a lot of attention to detail on these sites?

2. What are your payment terms?
Our webmaster works on a monthly basis – we prepay for the month and he keeps track of hours publicly where we can see them and notes of all he has done over the month with a Google Doc online. It’s updated daily. We can see most of the results of what he’s done live on the site and question if anything seems wrong. Will your webmaster do the same for you?

Payment terms are very difficult to come to agreement on and is probably the single most destructive part of the entire process!

3. If you will go over on your hours estimate – how much notice will you give me, and, at what rate will it be charged?
When a developer gives you an estimate of hours it should be very close to reality. If the hours go over, probably he/she should eat the difference. If there was some add-on functionality you wanted after the original agreement was made then you can come up with a new agreement.

4. Do you do the needed graphics editing, video editing, and other media edits that might need done or do you outsource them?
Request to see samples of these too – editing graphics and video is much different than creating HTML code. Some business website developers are great at it – some, horrible. Find out before you hire.

5. Make it clear that you don’t want any links to any other sites coming from the pages on your site.
Many developers take it upon themselves to add hidden and sometimes brazen links to their own sites they have an interest in. You don’t want this as it devalues your site considerable in Google’s and possibly other search engine’s eyes.

Of course there are a whole lot of questions you’ll want to ask the future developer of your business website. One other subject you’ll definitely want to cover is SEO. You’ll want to find out if the person will optimize your site for SEO as your site is built. Building SEO into the design of the site as he/she goes is a smart way to develop so much of it doesn’t need to be done later.

If you need a web developer, the one that built our business websites might have some availability but you’ll have to check. Just let us know if you need a referral.