There are many different types of experts you can hire to help you with your website. Designers, copywriters, marketers, usability strategists, programmers and more. Selecting the right expert is hard enough, however once the expert has done the work how do you know what exactly they did? More importantly, how do you know if what they did is correct?
With some web-related experts, such as designers or copywriters, reviewing results is fairly simple. Designers create a visual that you can easily see. The writing from a copywriter can be read and accessed by anyone.
However with other web-related experts, like programmers (also known as developers or engineers), reviewing the results when you are not a programmer is trickier. After all, programmers write the code that powers your website.
How exactly are you to review that code when you do not know how to read that coding language? There are three key questions to ask when evaluating if the programmer did the work you requested and to determine how good the programmer’s work really was.
1. Does the website work? In all website programming jobs, there are still results that can be viewed by non-programmers on the website. For example, if a programmer created a shopping cart for your website, you can review and use that shopping cart to make sure there are no errors.
Beyond looking for errors, you need to ask does this thing created by the programmer actually work? That is: does it make sense? Is it easy to figure out how you get from Step A to Step B? Or would brain surgery be easier? If the website is not easy to use and if it does not make sense, the programmer failed and needs to do more work to simplify whatever code he or she wrote.
2. Does your programmer show you the results? A good programmer will run a variety of tests on the code that he or she wrote. This includes speed tests to determine how fast or slow the code runs, unit testing to check different units, or pieces, of the code for errors and link tests to make sure all the links within a piece of code actually work.
Not only should the programmer tell you that these tests (and others) have been run but the programmer should show you the results. A really good programmer will go over the results with you so that you clearly understand the strengths, and weaknesses, of the code that is on your website.
3. What is the future of the code? Almost every website needs to last more than just a few months. The programmer you hired needs to explain how your website will perform in the future. How large can your website get? How will changes be made in the future? How much traffic, roughly, can your website withstand? A good programmer will provide you answers to all of those, and related, questions. The point is to know more about your website and how your website works.
Related to this, the programmer needs to provide clear written instructions explaining where and how to make adjustments to the website code in the future. That way if you do need to change programmers there is documentation helping the new programmer understand what the former programmer did.
You cannot review the lines and lines of code that a programmer has written. Instead, you need to review the end results of the code the programmer and review your programmer’s thoughts on the code. By ensuring the programmer you hired has thoroughly tested the website and has thought about the future of the code, you will have a good sense of the quality of your website’s code and the quality of your programmer.
