Whether you are an independent business seeking development of a Wordpress site, a startup looking at building your first MVP, or a large corporation seeking flexible freelance workers, securing the best Web developers for your job can be a daunting task.
As a business, your website is often the first contact you will have with potential customers. Therefore, the design of the site, the UX, its funnel optimisation and speed, are all hugely important to customer acquisition, regardless of the product of the company. The platform here at Freelancer.com has been proven as an invaluable resource for all businesses looking to build this online presence.
Therefore, a Web developer can be one of your most critical hires, but how do you find the best fit for your specific task? Here's how:
Examine past performance
At Freelancer, we provide a leaderboard for Web developers, providing all potential employers with an up-to-date source of the best reviewed talent on our platform each and every month. By looking at the profile page of each freelancer, you can clearly see examples of recent work, their rating out of 5 as well as the percentage of their jobs completed on-time, within budget and their repeat hire rate. These stats will give you a very clear understanding on the recent performance of these Web developers and what their past employers have thought about their work.
Test a promising Web developer with a small project first
What better way to find out if a Web developer is right for your project than to test them with a small piece of work first, and then re-employ should you be satisfied with the completed task. For example, ask them to construct a landing page for your site initially. Once you're satisfied with the completed project, and you are happy with how the freelancers communicated and delivered the task, pick the best one you want to build the rest of the site.
Check out their work
Most Web developers will have many examples of sites they have built previously. You can easily look at and even use these sites to fully explore the results of their work to date. The beauty of hiring Web developers is that their previous products are usually in an open forum for everyone to see and use.
How will the Web developer maintain your site
One of the biggest problems encountered with businesses building their first web site and hiring their first Web developer is that many will assume this is a one time piece of work. Websites require maintenance. Websites must be kept up to date, and this is certainly true should the site require third party plug-ins or software to function. Make sure maintenance is discussed when making your choice of hire.
Use the Milestone System
The milestone payment system provided by Freelancer.com was introduced to assure trust and security throughout the process of working with any freelancer. It also allows an employer to break down a piece of web development work into measurable milestones, which not only keeps the work on-track, it also allows you and your developer to anticipate adjustments should they need to be made. This type of iterative development gives confidence to you as an employer rather than just hoping the work will be delivered on-time and exactly as you assumed.
Use the Recruiter upgrade
Selecting the Recruiter upgrade when posting a project connects you to a global team of expert Recruiters on the Freelancer.com platform. To get started on your project, a Recruiter will contact you, and will then look into our Preferred Freelancers, who are Web developers, to invite them to bid on your project. This is to make sure you get the highest quality bids and the Recruiter can even select trusted Web developers for you.
We hope these tips can help you find the right Web developer for your site. Ready to post your project?
