How To Choose a Web Development Company

A good web development company can build a website that best meets your business goals.

Online searching is the top factor affecting buying decisions of midsize business-service purchasers. The resource has outpaced social media, references from other clients, and even recommendations of personal networks.^[1] Subsequently, websites have become central to every business' branding and marketing. 

If you don't have the time and resources to create your own website, you can hire a web development company. But before you finalize web developers for your business, it is crucial to understand what they do and how to choose a web development company to achieve your business objectives.

What services do web development companies provide?

While each web development service provider may offer some unique services, they all typically provide the same basic portfolio of web development company services.

Full-service development

A full-service development company can produce a full-fledged website for your company. You don't need an existing site, graphics, or content, as they will build your site from scratch. These companies have creative teams that can produce:

• Your basic web architecture, with efficient and intuitive navigation

• The type of website (eCommerce, blog, informational website, etc.) that best suits your business needs

• Graphics and other design elements to make your site appealing for the visitors

• Fonts, color palettes, and phrasing patterns to complement your brand image

• Sub-sites that connect to your main site

Also, a full-service development company can provide you with basic analytics to help you assess visitors' time spent on a page, their location, among other important metrics to improve your business.

ECommerce development

An eCommerce web development company can make your site a selling portal, so you can monetize your offerings online. This typically involves using preset but customizable tools to help streamline the buying process for customers. These tools often consist of widgets and application programming interfaces (APIs) with features such as

• Shopping carts

• Image carousels visitors can use to browse products

• Product descriptions and technical specifications

• Secure payment infrastructure, including encryption and two-factor authentication 

• Caching systems to help the users' browser remember their previous actions on the website

ECommerce developers can also provide you with an extensive array of sales and web traffic analytics tools. You can use these to understand the correlations between the number of visitors and sales, time spent on specific web pages and purchases, time spent during the check-out process, and shopping cart abandonment rates.

Custom website development

Custom website development is required when most of your website's features have to be coded from scratch. As it is similar to full-service development, the programmers use pre-designed tools from coding libraries, which act as the basic building blocks to create a unique, custom website. 

Let's say you manufacture circuit boards for car makers, and you need an interactive website to boost sales. You may want a page that allows visitors to combine virtual circuit board components while experimenting with different combinations as they go along. Visitors could use the page to see how a faster processor would affect the power used by the system. 

Obviously, you can't just jump onto a website builder, such as Wix.com, and pull up a "circuit board experimental playground" widget. A custom website development company can serve you best.

CMS website development

CMS website development uses a content management system (CMS) as a source for all of the site's features, design, and functions. The developer maintains a content storehouse, which they use to pull your site's design elements and other content, such as:

• Images

• Articles and blogs

• Charts and graphs

• Navigational elements, such as linking systems

• Branding elements

Common CMS website development tools, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal come with tons of preset tools that developers can use to build your site. You may have to provide the articles, blogs, and images you need on your website.

Front-end website design and development

Front-end developers are responsible for creating everything your visitors interact with when they're on your site. They make sure your site performs as you need it to. A front-end developer would work on:

• The structure and layout of your web pages using a hypertext markup language (HTML).

• Cascading style sheets (CSS) styling, which provides you with the color schemes, fonts, and layouts that make your site unique.

• JavaScript functions, such as animations and transitions as users go from one image to another or as they hover the cursor over certain page elements.

• Making a website functional across different browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, and addressing any potential compatibility issues.

• Performance optimization to improve page loading speed and ensure optimal user experience.

Front-end development may sound like a relatively narrow niche. But these professionals can ensure your site looks, feels, and performs exactly as your visitors need it to, which makes a huge difference when it comes to customer recruitment and retention.

Back-end website development

The back-end of your site includes everything that users don't see. It ensures proper functionality for a smooth visitor experience. A back-end developer would handle elements like:

• Database design and management: A database is a storehouse of data your site needs to provide users. A back-end developer makes sure any databases your site needs can store, manipulate, retrieve, and edit data.

• Server-side development: Visitors can see websites because servers provide the web address to visitors' web browsers. Server-side development involves making sure the server can fulfill requests submitted by users.

• API development and management: An API is a software that performs specific, limited functions on a site. For example, a financial website may have an API that displays stock prices, and a travel site may have an API that provides real-time weather data. A back-end developer will source the best APIs for your site.

Website support and maintenance

Even if you already have a website, you can still hire a developer to support and maintain it. A lot goes into making an effective site a hit with visitors, and many of these elements must be updated, improved, or fixed frequently. Here are some services you may get with a website support and maintenance service package:

• Software updates: To make sure any plugins, content management systems, or themes represent the latest tools available.

• Security monitoring and mitigation: To defend against hackers who may use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) or malware attacks to harm your site.

• Performance optimization: Sometimes the code, images, video, or other site elements can negatively impact page loading. Developers periodically optimize your website's performance to ensure everything is at par.

Questions to ask a website developer

You can avoid choosing the wrong web developer by doing some prior research. It is important to ask questions so you can assess if the selected developer can meet your business needs. Barch Labunski, Founder of Rank Secure, shares these four questions that you should ask your developer in the pre-development stage:

As you narrow down your list of companies, you may ask questions about:

• Company's niches, if any

• Company's communication style

• What they may need from you to get started

• How long each stage may take to complete

• The maximum number of revisions you're allowed to request

After the project has started, you can continue to ask questions about:

• Company information they'd like you to provide

• Images, fonts, and other brand-related collateral they require

• If the development company would like you to participate in the testing process

How to choose a web development company

In addition to asking the above questions to choose the best web development company, you should:

Next steps

As a small and midsize business leader, you should figure out what services you need before you look for a web developer. Next, prepare a list of top web development companies so you can ask the right questions before you make a final decision.