How do you know if a website developer is any good?

You know the story; you have a website which needs to grow and is looking dated and rather behind the times… Something has to be done, a Spring refresh is required to bring the website up to standard and make it work well AND be well indexed by Google.

But who do you trust with this task? and more importantly how do you know if they actually delivered on what they said they would? Without having the website development skills yourself its difficult to know if they actually did a good job – there seems to be no way, as a layman, to actually quantify the quality of their work, let alone pinpoint what they did wrong and hold them accountable.

Do you just pick at random and hope and pray that whoever you picked does a good job? There has to be a better way…

Well, help is at hand, you can make use of the Aykira Website Checker Tool to put you squarely in control! The Website Checker Tool can assist you at all stages of the engagement with a website developer.

Website Developer Skills Assessment – pick the best!

With the Website Checker you can run checks across their portfolio of work and make sure they actually can do the things they say. This is often quite an eye opener and an effective way to separate the wheat from the chaff quickly and easily. Everything is scored from SEO to Performance, so you can quickly paint a picture as to their skills set.

Website Development Quality Control – trust but verify

Immediately prior to have a developer work on your website you need to do two things, first make a complete backup of your website (in the unlikely event they completely mess things up, rare but possible) and secondly run a Website Checker report across the site – this way you have a benchmark against which to compare the work of the developer against. In fact it would probably be a good thing to share the report with developer (which is easy to do) and use the ability to comment inline to indicate what you want fixed as a priority. This also lets them know in a nice way that they will be measured.

Then once the developer has finished their work, generate another report and use the ‘compare’ feature to see what has actually changed. This provides the ultimate qualitative measure of their work and they know it – so if they didn’t do what they said they would do you have it there in the report and can ensure it gets fixed.

Ongoing Monitoring – steer the ship with confidence

The Website Checker’s benefits do not stop once the site is completed, you can link the tool to your Google Analytics Account and see in the reports how your website is doing traffic and keyword wise. You can even schedule reports to be generated periodically and have it notify you if something dramatically changes.

So what have you got to loose (except the time, money and inconvenience of picking a ‘duff’ developer) – try out the Website Checker Tool now and get ahead of the game.

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Keith

Director at Aykira Pty Ltd
Keith is a founder of Aykira & has over 18 years experience with everything Internet. From eCommerce to security, mobile to maps; large or small. PhD in Info Systems, member Australian & British Computer Society's, ex Yahoo. Architect/Engineer/Innovator.