Things to look for when choosing a web development company

Written by Ramón Saquete

When we need to choose a web development company to develop a new website for us, it’s important to look at the quality of work we’re going to get, besides the price. A quality website, made by good engineers who’ve worked in the field for years, can help you recover the investment in no time, generating great profit in the long term.

Of course, to have a quality website the initial investment will probably be bigger than what you’d expect, and perhaps right now you’re probably thinking that you don’t even need neither too much quality, nor too much work. However, stop and think for a moment to consider the possibility that you are completely wrong about this, because this is what the future of your enterprise could depend on; that is, the image you want to transmit to your clients and the investment you’ll have to make on the website once it’s developed.

Most clients are surprised by the amount of work it takes to build a good website.

I’m not saying that you’ll have to take out a loan from a bank to pay for the website. If the project you have in mind requires more work than you initially thought, and the budget exceeds your expectations, it’s always possible to impose some limits and remove some dispensable features. This way, the website can be published as soon as possible, and once the initial investment has been recovered, you can keep investing into adding those features, which were deemed secondary.

There are many companies, which nowadays would not be able to survive if it weren’t for the online world. It costs a lot less to get a professional and quality website developed for you, with a bigger investment, than to have a website, which will require you to invest a lot into development and consultation later, in order to correct the shortcomings which weren’t thought of at the beginning. In a worst-case scenario, a badly executed project can even force you to throw all the website’s code away, and start over from scratch.

But… what is quality in terms of web development? Let’s see the characteristics a website should have, to be considered professional and of a good quality:

The app does everything you need

Any development project entails meetings to elaborate an initial analysis, gathering all the requirements and goals of the website the client wants to have. At this point, we must have a proactive attitude, proposing features that can be interesting, or alternative ideas we know can generate good results. At the end of each stage of the project, we must always verify that everything works as per our request.

Maintainability

Occasionally, we may need to update our website, for various reasons, with new features or content to adapt to our company’s changing environment.

The time it takes for the developer to make the changes, and therefore, the amount of money we will have to pay them, will depend on how well-structured, simple and clean is the application’s code. This difference in time can be enormous, and it can even make a particular change inviable.

Keeping the code maintainable is not an easy task. Maintainability is the primary quality, which makes the code of an experienced engineer stand out.

The developer needs knowledge, experience and intelligence to be able to create maintainable, with high cohesion and low coupling.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Does the web developer you’ve hired know how to create a website that is SEO-ready? Do they know about indexability, meta tags, redirects, structured data, etc.? If you look for an SEO-friendly website, these are some of the aspects your website should be ready for.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)

When we create prototypes and review the designs, we should strive to focus everything on guiding the user towards our website’s conversion goals.

WPO (Web Performance Optimisation)

We must apply all kinds of optimisations, both client-side and server-side, so that the website works smoothly. The faster a website loads, the better the results it will get in terms of SEO, in addition to better user experience and more conversions.

Security

Websites should be protected against all sorts of attacks: SQL Injection, XSS, CSRF, brute force attacks, etc. Which is why the developer should be aware of these dangers and the way to defend the website against them.

Reliability

To prevent our websites from containing errors, we must create test scenarios, in order to conduct unit testing and integration tests, besides manual reviews. These are the methodical and studied ways of testing applications. This task often takes longer than the programming itself, but it is necessary, because the data combinations that might lead to errors can be in the thousands or even millions.

Stability and scalability

Quite a few websites see their performance degrade exponentially as content increases, making it impossible to use the website when it reaches a certain point. Websites must be capable of supporting the work and content load, with a continuously increasing resource consumption, without surprises. The way to achieve this is through a well-optimised and quality code.

Accessibility

In the present day, the website must be ready from the beginning to work on mobile phones, tablets, and personal computers. For this, we can use responsive design and adaptive websites with version-specific code.

Additionally, we can adapt our website to being browsed by people with any level of disability, in compliance with the WCAG guidelines.

Usability

The ease of use is directly related to the time a user spends on our website and the amount of conversions we are going to get. If the user has difficulties to use our application, they will never buy or fill in contact requests.

Easy to manage

The easier it is to manage a website from its admin panel, the lesser we will have to request the developers to make changes to our website’s content.

Attractive and functional design

The design should be adapted to the image of our company we want to broadcast, and to the aesthetic preferences of the employer, but without forgetting the functionality aspect of the website.

Meet legal regulations

Any website should have the cookies warning, legal notice checkboxes for the forms, and other legal requirements, to prevent the unpleasant surprise of your website being reported to the legal authorities.

Use current technologies

When websites are developed using modern, but stable technologies, such as HTML5 and CSS3, we get better features and better download times. The developer should be learning continuously.

So, there you go, if you want to differentiate yourself from the competition, make sure that the development company you hire meets these fundamental quality requirements.