Everything You Need to Do Before You Order a Website or Online Store
Check out the contractor
Often the success of your business depends on the quality of the software you use. One important factor that affects the quality of your website is the skills of the programmer who develops it for you. How to check them:
Ask for and test the best implementation
Nothing will provide you with a more reliable knowledge of your contractor's competence than the mistakes (or lack thereof) he makes during web design. You can check them by analyzing his latest realizations. I'm mainly referring to errors that you may not notice at first glance. If you don't know how to do it, I can help: How do you check a website or store?. If your potential contractor's sites do not perform satisfactorily in tests, the errors found will be able to serve you as a bargaining chip when negotiating the price. Alternatively, you can ask why he didn't take care to eliminate them. Remember that errors are not always the fault of the programmer, as, for example, the owner of the site may have hired another person to run the application after it was completed. However, be alert to possible excuses to justify an incorrectly made site. But you will read about this later in the article.
Stalking
Of course, with a wink - the idea is to check the experience of the potential contractor. Where did he work and what is his approach to the work. If you have decided on an interactive agency, ask for information on the specialists who will do your site.
Often people who claim several years of experience, in fact, to their credit they have only finished a few weekend courses. So what if a person has several years of experience, if he or she duplicates the same mistakes for several years?
What are people saying?
Check online reviews about the agency or contractor, but try to verify them. Reviews have it that they can be written by anyone and are very often an unfair form of competition. Try to distinguish reliable comments from those written by anonymous people without any constructive content or a low rating alone without any comment. If you have any doubts - confront a potential contractor with a negative review.
Trust and control
As the leftist classicist used to say, you can trust the contractor, but at the same time write down all the perks he offers to confront them with reality at the end of the job. Keep in mind, however, that not all of the contractor's assets apply specifically to your project. For example: when you will be ordering an application that runs locally, it is not necessary that it be optimized for search engines. So that there is no ambiguity, it is worthwhile to establish all the details in advance.
Don't be fooled into a bottle
A common recurring practice in marketing from under the dark star is to take advantage of the customer's ignorance and so-called understatement. After analyzing nearly a hundred ads offering to create a website on a budget of less than a thousand zlotys, I made a list of hooks that can mislead or be part of a crude scam. Let me present the most popular ones:
Responsiveness
Website developers very often cite as a trump card that the designs they have made are responsive, i.e. adapted to the screens of mobile devices. I myself personally include this information in the offer of my services. I do this mainly because of frequent inquiries "is the application made for phones?". However, the responsiveness of the site is a no-brainer. If you are buying a car, is the information that it will have wheels an asset to you? Another issue is the correctness of RWD implementation. Often we find that contractors only adjust the site to popular thresholds, and at less typical resolutions, such as 1000px, the site flounders. A common explanation we may hear is that "there are no devices with such resolutions". Well ok, but what if they do appear?
CMS panel
A situation similar to responsiveness: not an asset, but an obligation. In addition, reporting that with a CMS anyone can edit a website or store is not true. Yes, you can edit content and layout, but if you don't have the basic knowledge then you can easily damage the site, neglect optimization or make unfavorable-looking changes.
Restrictions
I never understood restrictions like: blocking the number of subpages. However, I have encountered even greater absurdities of the type: implementing RWD for an additional fee. It is also common practice to hide information about additional fees, which actually involves adding costs at the very first stage of implementing changes to the site.
No subscription, possibly a free website
A clever trick, most often dishonest contractors inform you that their site is free or possibly you don't pay a subscription. But there is one catch: you land on one server along with a dozen other clients of this agency. You are then charged a hosting fee once a year, as if you were paying for your account yourself. That is, you don't pay for a hosting account, but actually for a subscription. This is a very common and harmful phenomenon, so I advise you to be very careful.
Free SSL Certificate
Oh gracious, how good of you to buy certificates and hand them out right and left. And by chance, isn't it the case that every self-respecting hosting solution provider offers a free Let's Encrypt certificate? Well, of course they do.
Optimization and Google index submission
Here, the hands are already dropping. I'm leaving aside the issue of adding to Google's index, which is an activity that is done practically by the way. But let's focus on optimization. More than 90% of the pages I had the opportunity to test did not even reach the absolute minimum in Google's tests. The code of some pages is even the antithesis of web design. Ba! I happened to test a page based on tables. In the age of CSS grids, where layout design has never been so simple, someone is stuck in the era of the slate computer and calls his sites professional.
Unlimited number of amendments
Here you do not even need to know to know that this promise is sewn with thick threads. That is, according to the pathology of the Polish half-world of websites, we can freely modify the ordered project. Let's change the industry, let's change everything we can. Without end. It's like ordering a crew to build a house, and after the job is done, we find that we want a small garage after all. After all, amendments without limit. Let's respect each other dear, after all, it is clear that no one will allow it.
Customized design
That is, the ready-made created by modules for generating HTML sections. The level of optimization of such constructions is an indicator of their quality. How to check it? You can read about it here.
Excuses
A common attempt to hide one's shortcomings or lack of skills is to pull the wool over the eyes of clients. Let's look at the most popular excuses designed to justify potential contractors.
At this resolution, the site does not necessarily work
Nonsense! Correctly implemented RWD makes the app behave predictably and look the desired way on any resolution. Of course, the exceptions here are the outliers, although the app's big advantage is that it displays correctly on smartwatch devices. For me personally, the lower limit is a resolution at 300px wide or high. Although purists argue that the site should display predictably even on smaller screens.
Google disregards PageSpeed Insights test results
Well, it takes. The key to a successful site is optimization. I write more about this in the article How do you check a website or store?. A flawed application cannot be explained by a low budget, lack of time or the need for quick implementation. Just as we require a certain minimum from a car, I see no reason to behave differently in the case of web applications.
The accessibility of the application is not required, how many invalids you will have on the site.
A topic that is treated negligently in our country. From a business position, I understand that maybe someone does not want to implement certain functionalities to facilitate the use of the site for people with disabilities, but in practice they do not require much effort. And I guess every customer is valuable?
The client didn't have the right budget, so he got what he got
This argument is probably the stupidest. How can you explain flawed software by lack of budget for its implementation? It's like a mechanic saying: "due to lack of money I did not put oil in your car". If the customer does not have a sufficient budget, an adequate solution should be presented to him. Going back to my example - you need to offer cheaper oil. And not instead install poorly made templates, slightly modifying them and telling the Client that we have made a professional website or store, which in fact will disappear at the gray end of the search results.
Summary
I hope that exposing these dishonest practices will save you from buying an app that won't help you enough but will also harm your business. However, if you are a contractor who offers your clients scabby quality sites using the techniques described, then piss on your ass. Know that you may be responsible for the demise of one of your client's businesses.
Good luck and remember - I'm here to help if you have any problems!