Do you need a website and looking out for a web developer to build one for you? But not sure about the items your web development proposal should have? No worries.
In this blog post, I will take you through 12 essential items that you must expect from your web developer.
#1 Vibrant Design
Attractive & vibrant design is the foremost requirement of a successful website.
If you want your website to outrank your competition and get more engagement & business, you must ensure that your website design looks great.
#2 Responsive Layout
Having a responsive website design (for all smart devices such as mobiles and tablets) is no more fancy now. Rather its mandatory.
Here are but few major benefits of a responsive web design:
- Better loading time
- Better SEO
- More conversions
- Lower bounce rate
#3 Fast Loading Webpages
You web developer must be able to deliver a fast loading website for you.
Before you accept the final work and go live with your new website, you must ask your developer to test the website for the loading speed.
A fast loading website helps not only in enhancing the users experience, but it also helps in SEO. How?
Well, search engines like Google love fast loading websites and consider them for higher rankings over the ones that load slower.
#4 Basic SEO Features
Without SEO, you can’t get quality organic traffic on your website. Therefore, you must expect a SEO-friendly website from your web developer.
Your web developer must build a website that has:
- Meta tags provision
- Alt tags for images
- Image optimization
- Internal linking
- Fast loading pages
- Responsive web design
- Minified CSS & JS
#5 Stable CMS
Using CMS (content management system) is very common for website development these days.
A CMS helps the webmasters/website owners to manage the content of their website easily without the help of any web developer. It helps not only in saving money, but it also make the process faster.
Imagine if you need to make some minor changes on your website and you are dependent on your web developer to do that vs you login and make those changes in less than 5 minutes.
Therefore, you must expect your web developer to use a stable CMS like WordPress so that you can easily learn and take control of your website.
#6 Forms
Some web developers charge additionally for developing contact & enquiry forms on their clients’ website. But ideally, it should be the part of their job.
You can expect a minimum of one form or maximum 2 forms on your website within the same website development cost.
#7 Logo Design
When you hire a web designer to create a logo for you, he or she will charge you for that, which makes sense.
But if you are hiring a web developer to build your website, you can expect your developer to include logo design as an integral part of their web design proposal.
#8 Website Hosting
If you’ve got enough experience in web hosting and domain name stuffs, you can arrange them yourself.
However if you don’t want to get into these technical jargons, your hired web developer should be able to help you & make necessary arrangements to host your website.
#9 Short Training
When you hire a web developer to build your company website or an ecommerce website, you can expect him or her to arrange for a short training at your convenient place so that you can learn and take control of your website.
In other words, you can expect your web developer to train you on how you can manage your website.
#10 Google Analytics
Google Analytics help you to get insights on the visitors and their behaviour on your website.
If you want to measure the success of your online marketing & advertising efforts, installing a web analytic tool like Google Analytics is imperative.
Even if you are not investing on marketing or advertising but do intend to initiate in future, you can still have Google Analytics integrated with your website. After all, its totally free and takes few minutes for your web developer to install it on your website.
#11 Warranty
You can definitely expect at least 3 months of warranty (post launch) from your web developer.
If you face any issues or bugs on your website, your web developer should be bound to fix them within the warranty period.
#12 Security
Did you know that the number of hacked sites are rising rapidly?
According to Google Webmaster Central Blog “There was a 32 percent increase in the number of hacked sites in 2016 compared to 2015.”
Hence you must expect your web developer to take all the precautions, install necessary plugins/modules and provide you with the support against all the threats, hacks and virus attacks.