What To Look For When Hiring A Web Developer

Our connected present is inevitably leading to an almost fully realized digital future. The humble website is a cultural, institutional pillar of your enterprise: it’s the doorway to your identity, the vehicle for progress, and in almost every circumstance the one way people find out about what you do. Making one, and maintaining one, takes a very specific type of talent.

How we build enterprise identity revolves mainly around how good a website is at communicating your purpose, your service, your culture, and your history. The website is an all-important brand tool, central to your marketing and service effort, and the one true HQ for your service and image online. 

Having a competitive, healthy, well-run, contemporary, meaningful website is both necessary and expected - enter, the Web Developer. 

Next to your CEO this person or persons may well be the most important employee/s in your company - they are the architects of your online brand persona, and they provide the basis from which your marketing, branding, and pretty much all of your sales (if required) get made and pushed to customers. 

It’s not hyperbolic to say that underinvesting in your web design and build will result in catastrophic business failure - even if your business does not operate online (see: Hospitality, Construction, Healthcare, Law, etc) not having a presence online means your service cannot be found, compared, or interacted with - hence, failure. 

What does a web developer do?

Your web developer is the builder of your website. Simple. However, the way in which they build your website, the process in which it’s made, debugged, remade, perfected, and optimized can be a meandering process, requiring iterative feedback, teamwork, collaborative input from other departments, and a lot of patience. This part is not simple. 

The difference between a good web developer and the right web developer

Your web developer will be translating your entire business model into a concise, presented webpage. That takes not only coding and UX skill, but a fundamental understanding of your brand, product, service, workflow, marketing, and scaling.

This is because your web developer or web developer team provides the foundation for which everything works online - they are the scaffold for your web presence. 

A good developer understands the mechanizations of web pages; the quirks of development and debugging; the fickle movements of website visitors; the “three-click rule” and whether it bears click-through fruit; and how to optimize pages for mobile use. But does that make them the right developer for you?

Finding a good developer or web development agency is easy - but the key to a great developer is market specificity: how this developer works with you, your industry, and your needs. 

For example, a web development team with experience in online gambling may not be the best team to hire for your real estate business. Or, for those in more public-facing services like healthcare, the charity sector or the military, your web team needs to be cognizant of the altruistic or public service provided. 

All these sectors require something different: a different flow, a different design, different layouts, different accessibilities, and success is only guaranteed when your web team and wider staff are aligned on what you’re doing, within the context of your competitors and the industry at large.

The key to finding a talented developer is less about finding the best coder of your applicants - it’s about finding the right personality who can drive your company on and be the voice of responsibility when there are issues.

Top 5 traits that make a great web developer. 

Problem Solver - the heart of debugging a website is the art of problem-solving. Your web developer needs to be keen-eyed and able to spot errors efficiently and effectively. 

Iterative Learner - your web developer has to be both able to provide advice, and take it, in equal measure. There are always snags, errors, and problems to iron out during development cycles, so having a passionate, but iterative, approach to learning is a must. 

A passion for the job - it sounds so simple, but like anything creative you have to love what you do. Although web development seems tech-y in a traditional sense, great developers are digital artists, bringing a love of form, web history, precedent, usability, and UX to the job. 

Collaborator - if your web development team can’t collaborate with marketing, or are unable to communicate their issues to wider stakeholders, or are unable to align with sales, you’ll find an enterprise working with one hand behind their back.

Business acumen - web developers need to have a decent hold on trends, the industry, and the business they’re working on to fully grasp the scope of the site, its needs, and to predict where and if issues will arise.