Laptop Warriors

10 Reasons to Fire your Web Developer

Fraser Paterson

10 Reasons to Fire your Web Developer

by Nov 29, 2016Digital Marketing

A picture is worth a thousand words. And I could not have picked a better image to display how maddening some website developers have made me.  This was the reason I opened my own company. lol. There is nothing worse than feeling of helplessness when your website goes down or something is not working.  There is nothing more frustrated than changes taking what feels like forever.  When you discuss changes to the website, and can’t help get the feeling that they are not acting in your best interest and working inefficiently to bill more hours. The frustration of feeling that you need to tell everyone what to do.  But wait, aren’t your developers supposed to be the experts and laying out the plan for what is best for your digital business?

I AM GOING TO PULL BACK THE CURTAINS AND REVEAL TO YOU THE TOP REASONS YOU SHOULD FIRE YOUR WEB DEVELOPER:

1. THEY HOLD YOUR WEBSITE HOSTAGE

In many cases you may think they are saving you time by buying your domain name for you. But in case of a separation (or dispute over payment) they will be the first to turn off your website or refuse to send your files over to you.  They will have the power because they own your domain.  Make sure that the domain is registered to you and that you have access to the domain register where it was setup, and make sure that they send you updates of all your website files.

2. THEY NEVER INSTALL GOOGLE ANALYTICS

This is literally a 4 minute job to setup on your website and is probably the most important thing that can be done because it tells you exactly where your visitors are from, what pages they visit, how long they spend, where they are from, and most importantly shows you exactly your ROI on your investment. Either your designer does not know how to use Google Analytics (red flags) or they did not think it was involved in the quote and would not spend the extra few minutes in the best interest of the client.

3. YOUR WEBSITE DESIGNER/DEVELOPER IS RELATED TO YOU

If I had a dollar for every time someone said my nephew or niece is in university and will look after it for me.  And something screwed up. Either they did not take proper backups, forgot to register a domain, or forgot the most basic thing such as not putting in title tags can greatly hurt your performance.  Or…too busy with school to help you when you really need it.

4. THEY ARE NOT USING PROJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

I absolutely love Team Works, but as long as they are using a project management system otherwise they may be lacking organization.  My project management system does invoicing, time tracking, and provides a complete transparent history of everything I do.  Not only this, but it is the best for client corresponding responding directly to any questions and to follow up when they don’t get anything back.

5. THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE AND BEST PLACE TO FIND THEM

Keyword Research, competitor intelligence, and just speaking with you does more then you could imagine. A website needs to be built for conversions and data research is so important.

6. DO NOT PROVIDE SCOPE OF WORK BEFORE EACH CHANGE

A project brief. This has saved me so much time and anger as a website designer, but also as a client.  You need to provide the basic outlines what you are looking for and either request a full estimate of hours, what is to be included, or even a fixed rate cost to ensure that everything is completed. I personally would have my clients sign off on them if it was more than 4 hours.

7. NO CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

We are no longer in the 1990’s and if your website developer is coding your website in HTML and not using a pre-designed it’s a sign to run.  Pre-designed website theme’s are awesome, save you time and money. Find tons of theme’s available on Themeforest.  This is where you got all of our customers themes.

8. THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND SEO

It is one thing to build technical or pretty sites, but does not benefit you if your customers cannot find you. You may as well be in the yellow pages. SEO is not rocket science; google is so good that its job is to provide the best search possible. Content is king, but just using proper title tags (up to 70 characters long) and providing a sitemap will ensure at least people find you when they google you.  A very easy way to see how well they know SEO is to run your website through the free program www.woorank.com. This instantly spits out a report with the main facts.

9. HORRIBLE STOCK IMAGES

aka the headset receptionist (need I say more).

10. THEY TRY TO DO EVERYTHING THEMSELVES

We can not all be awesome at everything (I mean we try) but each person needs to have their own specialties. Many designers can not program. Programmers have troubles actually talking to people. SEO / Social Media people may not even know a single line of code and usually the good sales people. While copywriters usually are similar to programmers and can not speak to you unless spoken too.  Choose a good team and stick with them!

Before you hastily fire your web developer, make sure you own your own domain.   You can see who owns your domain by going to whois.net  and see where your website is hosted by going to whoishostingthis.com

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