Word presses Developer and Need

First explore the possibility of creating your site on a free platform like Word Press using a platform like Word Press saves money, offers an online community if you get stuck, as well as more control over your site. I launched my blog with Word Press but needed more functionality for my website tha
I could get with Word Press, so decided to hire a developer.

I wrote down exactly what I wanted on my website - how I wanted it to look and the functionalities I needed. Having the detail was great for comparing proposals. The risk of having such a detailed proposal was that I wasn't sure if it closed off my developer from offering other ideas, features I may not have been.

I threw out those who took more than a few days to respond or never responded at all, had a string of complaints on Yelp or who misrepresented who they were on their website; for example, displayed different pages of the same website as different website clients in their portfolio, or projected themselves as a bona fide enterprise when it was a freelancer with a full time job doing websites evenings and weekends.

When it came time to ask for a proposal, I was glad I had prepared such a detailed document to give them. It gave me confidence their prices would reflect the same understanding of what needed to be done. If you're looking to hire a website developer, do your homework. It's the Wild West out there, especially if you don't have any experience with websites and coding like me. I launched a website over a year ago and ended up in a good place but it was a lot of working finding the right developer. Here are some lessons learned.

The rest emailed or called with a few clarifying questions and thanked me for the detail as it made their job so much easier. The one step I would have added if I had known better at the time was to find out how much I would be able to do on the site myself. I'm able to make simple content changes directly but not any changes that require coding.

I looked for clients who had websites with similar functionalities to what I wanted but also websites from different-size companies - from the mom and pop shops to larger businesses. It's been a year now of working with this firm and I've been happy. They're professional, delivered as promised for the price they quoted and good to work with.

This past year, I learned just to make simple improvements but because my web developer has control over most of the back end, I can't make those changes directly. Instead I need to pay development time which has been the only frustrating part of the process. There are definitely things I would want my developer to do but some of the little things, like putting a line of code into the header, are things I would like to do myself.