5 questions you definitely need to ask when developing your website!

25.03.2016
Web Design

Developing your website with an external provider can either be the most amazing experience or it can be truly detrimental to your budget, time and most importantly the end result.

Here are 5 basic questions that you need to ask and have clear answers on when developing your site:

  1. Client references….. in your budget range?

This is the most obvious and basic question but make sure that when you are being shown beautiful sites with amazing aesthetic features and animated effects, that you get an indication of the budget that has been spent on the site. If you’re being shown sites that are in the 10K – 15K range and your budget is more like 5K, you are obviously not going to get the same results for your website. So understanding the quality of work that can be delivered within your budget is very important.

2. Platform?

Again a basic question but make sure that the CMS (Content Management System) that you will be using is open-source. There are still many web development companies today that work with their own, bespoke CMS systems. They draw you into their web and then you belong to them forever! If they disappear, if they change technology direction, or if you end up not agreeing in the future on rates being charged or a number of other things, you will be stuck with their website and their technology. It will be almost impossible to find a developer afterwards that will be willing to take on a bespoke CMS and make adjustments for you. However, if you use a popular open-source CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, you will have a fair chance of finding a vendor or a developer that can continue the work on your current site.

3. Deployment process?

Not a basic question. It’s important that your provider can provider you with proper deployment processes. A good vendor will provide you with a test site, a staging site and of course the live site. This allows you to experiment on the test site with changes, view their effect on the site, before deciding on deploying to live. If your vendor struggles with explaining their deployment procedures, there is a high probability you will run into issues in the future.

4. Theme or bespoke design?

It’s very important to know if your provider will be using a theme for your site or whether it will be a custom design and development. Make sure you ask the question and don’t assume it will be a custom design and development. Themes can be fantastic as long as you’re very involved in selecting which theme you are using for your site. Otherwise, a vendor may provide you with a design that is very much driven by the theme that they’re using to take shortcuts. They will unknowingly take you down a path which is quite fixed and constrained. You may actually look like a myriad of other sites out there without being aware of this.

5. Hosting and backup?

Make sure you take the time to understand the hosting and backup that you’re being offered. You need to know the limitations on size, traffic to your site, what happens in the case of downtime (redundancy, load balancing, etc.), and how often your site is being backed up and what that involves. It always surprises me how easily individuals and companies jump into hosting agreements without having a clear picture of all the parameters involved.

There are obviously many other questions that you need to ask your vendor, but these five will get you on the right path to making sure you have at least some peace of mind when entering into an agreement for your website.