The world of web development is still very much misunderstood. We've even heard people call it a "dark art". So when you need help turning your ideas and designs into a high-quality website or web application, how do you know who you can trust to get this done?
The purpose of this post is to provide some key points on what makes a good web development company and will help you understand the kind of questions you should be asking development companies.
This is going to be a very opinionated post and we make no apologies for it. If you disagree with anything we are certainly open to discussing it further.
Now to get on with the post. Below are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and what you should be looking for in a web development company.
• Don't specialize in one back-end technology
• Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects
• Flexible to change
• Use source control
Don't specialize in one back-end technology
There are a number of good back-end technologies that are appropriate for web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net, and PHP (and others). They all have their strengths and weaknesses and no one is perfect. A good web development company should be flexible in which technologies they use, so that they use the most appropriate one for their clients' needs.
The key reason we have spent time learning a number of technologies is to able to pick and choose the bits we like. Over the years the developers involved in The League have been able to take the good parts of each technology and formulate a number of best practices and use them across all platforms.
Flexible to change
We've all heard developers complaining how their clients' change the requirements of a project midway through a project. Developers need to stop complaining about this, it happens to us all and it's never going to change. A good web development company should have processes in place to cope with change. If you are a client, ask how change requests will be handled.
Web developers should work to short release cycles, preferably 1 - 2 weeks. The worst thing that can happen to a project is that the developers get the brief, start the work and then 2 months later they announce it's finished, only for the client to say "This isn't what I asked for!". By working with short release cycles, clients can be involved at all stages. At the end of each release, the client should review the project so far and submit any change requests.
Use source control
Our final recommendation is a pretty obvious and simple one, to most people, but we still speak to developers who don't use any form of source control. This seems more prevalent with freelancers as they don't see the need as they are the only ones working on the code. If that's how they see it, then they are missing the point.
There are lots of reasons why all code should be source controlled. We're are only going to mention a couple of key points here. Firstly it's a great way of keeping a log of changes made to the code. (As long as developers put a comment into the commit). Secondly and most importantly it allows developers to change code without the fear of losing already work already done. This is especially useful when trying out other possible coding solutions to a problem.
