Consultants, Developers, and other Specialists
- Consultants: there is a separation of concerns here also. Web developers do back end coding. Web designers do graphics. Marketing and communications people help you promote your site. SEO consultants help your web site search rank. Consider the importance of the division of labor and skills in your project, and do not assume that the one person you have found for the site is prepared and capable of doing everything you need to do.
- You may need a developer at some point in the process. Developers show off the free stuff they do so they can sell custom services. Developers should be able to give you lots of free advice up front before deciding what it is they will do for you for money. Developers should know something about programming languages like PHP and JavaScript, and possibly other languages such as Ruby On Rails, Python, Perl, Java. They should all know something about SQL, likely MySQL, and using the Linux/Unix shell.
- Design skills are known as ‘Front end’ skills, and while a developer will have a grab bag of design skills, don’t expect them to be master of everything. The better they are, the greater the division of labor and skills. But they should know something about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics for the web, useability, standards, social networking, and other tools that you can learn to use.
- A good developer should be able to educate you on how to do things. A good developer does not want to be tasked with doing your content updates. As a developer, my credo is not to work for a living, but to eliminate work. As automation is a very valuable service, there is always new work, and another thing to automate. Developers also provide problem solving with third party solutions like payment processing gateway accounts, clouds, custom coding and modifications, system backups, data imports and exports, performance reports, and provide formatting media formats for your website.
