What to look for when choosing a web development company?

Written by Ramón Saquete

When choosing a web development company, it is very important not only to look at the price, but also at the quality of the work you expect to get. A good quality Web site, created by good engineers who have been working in the sector for years, can make you recover your investment in a short time and generate great benefits in the long term.
Of course, to have a quality website, the initial investment will probably be higher than you expect. and maybe right now you think that the web you need does not require a lot of quality or a lot of work, but stop to think for a moment and consider the possibility that you are totally wrong, because the future of your company, the image you want to transmit to your customers and the investment you will have to make in the web once it is developed may depend on it.

Most customers are surprised to discover the amount of work it takes to create a website in good condition.

By all this I don’t mean that you have to ask for a loan from the bank to pay for the website. If the project you have in mind takes more work than you initially thought and the budget is beyond your expectations, you can always narrow it down and remove features that are expendable. This way you can publish the Web as soon as possible, so that once the initial investment has been amortized, you can continue investing in adding those functionalities that were left in the background.

There are many companies that would not be able to survive if they were not involved in the online world. And the fact is that it costs much less to have a professional quality web site made for you, with a higher initial investment, than to have a web site on which you will have to invest, later, large amounts in development and consultancy to correct deficiencies not initially contemplated. In the worst case, a bad development can even force you to throw all the code of the website in the trash, so that you have to start from scratch.

But what is quality in Web development? Let’s take a look at the characteristics that a website must have to be considered quality and professional:

The application does what you need

In any development project, meetings are always held to prepare an initial analysis, gathering all the requirements and objectives of the web that the client wants. At this point we must be proactive, proposing functionalities that could be interesting or alternative ideas that we know can generate good results.
At the end of each stage of the project always check that everything is working as requested.

Maintainability

Sometimes it happens that we need to update our Web, for various reasons, with new functionalities or content to adapt to the changing environment of the company.
The time it will take the developer to make the modifications, and therefore the amount of money to be paid, will depend on how well structured, simple and clean the application code is. This time difference can be abysmal, and may even make it unfeasible to carry out a given change.
Implementing maintainable code is not an easy task. Maintainability is the main quality in which code written by an experienced engineer stands out.

The developer needs knowledge, experience and intelligence to achieve maintainable code with high cohesion and low coupling.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Does the web developer you have hired know how to implement websites that are optimal for SEO? Do you know about indexability, meta tags, redirects, structured data, etc.? If you are looking for a SEO website, these are some of the points that your website should meet.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

When making prototypes and reviewing designs, make sure that everything is focused on guiding the user towards your Web’s conversion goals.

WPO (Web Performance Optimization)

All kinds of optimizations must be applied both at the client code level and at the server code level for the web to run smoothly. The faster a website loads, the better the SEO results, the better the user experience and the more conversions the website will have.

Security

Developments must be protected against all types of attacks: SQL Injection, XSS, CSRF, brute force attacks, etc. Therefore, the developer must be aware of these attacks and how to defend against them.

Reliability

In order to ensure that developments are error-free, test cases must be developed for unit and integration testing, in addition to manual reviews. These are methodical and studied ways of testing applications. This task often takes more time than the development itself, but it is necessary, since the combinations of data that can lead to error can be thousands or millions.

Stability and scalability

There are many websites where the performance degrades exponentially as the content increases, making it impossible to use the website at a certain point. Web developments must support the increase in workload and content, with a constant increase in resource consumption and without surprises, and the way to achieve this is through a well-optimized and quality programming.

Accessibility

Nowadays, web development must be designed from the beginning to work on cell phones, tablets and personal computers. Using responsive design and specific code for each version (adaptive webs).

Additionally, we can adapt the website so that people with any level of disability can use it, complying with WCAG guidelines.

Usability

The usability of a website is directly related to the time the user will spend on our website and the amount of conversions we achieve. If the user has difficulty using our application, he/she will never purchase or fill out contact requests.

Easy to manage

The easier it is to manage a website from your administration area, the less you will have to resort to programmers to make content changes on the website.

Attractive and functional designs

The design must be adapted to the image that the company wants to transmit and to the aesthetic preferences of the businessman, but without losing sight of the functional aspect of the web.

Adapt to legal regulations

Every website must have the cookie law notice, the legal text verification boxes of the forms and other legal requirements, so that you do not get the surprise of receiving a complaint for your website.

Use current technologies

When websites are developed with modern but established technologies, such as HTML5 and CSS3, better functionality and load times are achieved. Therefore, the web developer must be continuously learning.
So now you know, if you want to stand out from the competition, make sure that the development you have contracted meets these fundamental quality conditions.