How to Choose a Web Studio, A Guide for Entrepreneurs
If your business or any other endeavor requires a website, it’s likely you won’t be creating it yourself. Producing a quality product on your own these days is practically impossible and would take years to master. So, the inevitable question arises: to whom, which web studio, should you entrust this task?
We present to your attention a step-by-step plan on how to navigate this process and achieve what you desire. That is, a website that works and brings you clients in the broadest sense.
Contents
Determining Needs
Market Research
Clarifying Competencies
Matching Budget and Prices
First Contact and Questions
Evaluating Communication
Additional Services
Agreeing on Deadlines
Contract
Process Control
Evaluating Results
Subsequent Support
Determining Needs
The very first step is to determine what you need from the website and the web studio that will be tasked with the job. What do you want as the end result? Will it be an update or a creation of a new website from scratch?
To get exactly the result you want, you need to set the tasks correctly. For example, many clients call and ask us if it’s possible to create a simple one-page site. But one that fits everything.
Of course, it is possible. But creating such a company site is practically pointless. One-page sites rank very poorly in searches. And that’s the most important thing in the end—not just to create a page, but to make it a real marketing tool that brings in clients.
So, you need to do everything separately: a main page with the primary theme of the site, a product catalog or online store aimed at getting each product into the search, a blog on the site—to promote directly through search queries and provide information to potential visitors who want to learn something in advance. And then the technicalities—the about page and contact information.
Thus, the first thing is to articulate in detail what you would like to achieve. In practice, we usually help our clients at this very first preliminary stage to orient themselves and understand what they need in the end.
Market Research
Next, every client inevitably faces the choice: whom to work with—a freelance web developer, a studio, or hire their own team. Let’s consider all three options.
Websites come in different types. If the plan is to create an online presence for a small or medium business, make a business card site, an online store, or a catalog, then a freelancer or a studio can easily handle this.
However, if we are talking about a serious marketplace with thousands of participants, your own social network, or something similar, then development alone won’t suffice, and it’s better to immediately consider assembling your own in-house team for the creation and further support of the website.
What criteria are best for comparing the offers of web studios and freelance developers? The main ones are:
- Portfolio showcasing completed projects
- Client reviews, which can be obtained directly if desired
- Timelines that should be realistic based on the task
- Cost of work
Probably, if you still haven’t chosen us, you can simply create a table and compare all these criteria to determine the best one.
Clarifying Competencies
An important question, strangely enough. Can the developer offering you services actually do anything? This really happens. Today, there are many examples of websites being created without writing a single line of code. This is done using special constructors. And such work can be taken on by completely incompetent people, including students still learning at mass web development and programming schools.
Unfortunately, for a serious project, this is not a solution. Because such a “specialist” will try to do something only as long as everything works out of the box. But they will immediately “deflate” if something goes wrong. Then you will still have to pay a serious professional, at a very high hourly rate, as not everyone can work with someone else’s code and figure out the errors. Or you might even have to start everything from scratch.
Therefore, it wouldn’t hurt to ask a question like, “I’ll ask you as an artist to an artist, can you draw?” In our case, can your contractor program?
Matching Budget and Prices
Unfortunately or fortunately, you have to pay for quality and for someone else’s work. This raises a reasonable question: how much? The answer is simple: market price.
Yes, today you can find offers like this: students willing to do your project as practice. But, as they say, free treatment is worth what you pay for it. In the end, the client will likely just waste time. Bringing someone else’s project up to a decent level will not be cheaper than creating a new one from scratch.
We do not determine the prices, the market does. To understand how much a website will cost, you can start by looking at the global salaries of programmers. From there, based on the expected workload, you can evaluate whether a studio is offering its services at a fair price or not.
For example, if something can be done in a week, the price should be around one thousand euros. This is a fair price for the work of a qualified developer. In a month, a specialist can earn about four times more if they are employed full-time instead of working on your project.
But be careful. We noticed that intermediaries offer our specialists half the price, while charging clients twice as much as we do. They live quite well on these four percent margins—two plus two.
First Contact and Questions
Creating websites and promoting projects is, of course, a craft. But it is also a creative profession. There are no identical approaches. Uniqueness and enthusiasm are needed to ensure the work progresses well and the developer is passionate about doing a good job.
Therefore, it always makes sense to talk directly with the developers. Understand if you are a good match for each other. Is your business as interesting to your contractor as it is to you? Or will they just do what is written in the assignment from start to finish, only to leave you alone afterward?
For instance, we do not take on projects that do not interest us from the start. We refuse to develop websites about various types of fortune-telling, predictions, and other types of fraud. These topics do not interest us, so we do not take such orders.
On the contrary, startups and new types of businesses are always interesting. We gladly create such websites and continue to communicate with the owners. We share free advice, occasionally perform additional tasks and work. When necessary, we provide maintenance.
In general, always ask and discuss. A good web developer or studio will always be open to contact and ready to discuss the details of your project.
Evaluating Communication
Probably each of us has found ourselves in a situation where we needed something urgently, ordered it online, and faced difficulties right from the start—barely reaching the advertiser or website owner. Then, having paid, it became a major problem to get what we expected.
The point is that the contractor should be easily accessible during normal working hours. If it is impossible to contact them, look elsewhere. Otherwise, you won’t be able to get any results later.
It’s important to consider preferred methods of communication. For example, we have an agreement with our clients that urgent support and the fastest response are through WhatsApp. If something immediate arises, such as a critical issue with the website, we respond almost instantly via our number.
On the other hand, social media may have delays. In fact, many don’t respond to requests at all, as we all know.
Additional Services
This has become a trend in recent years. Many clients do not understand that the contractor, although often willing to make concessions and do something extra for free, primarily works according to the list in the technical assignment. What is paid for.
Therefore, when preparing an agreement, it is the best time to clearly identify what exactly will be done. What pages will be created on the website? Will there be a store or catalog? How many initial products or items will the developer upload?
The fact is that many clients do not distinguish well between creating a website and managing it. For instance, if an online store is being created, the initial work usually includes setting everything up and uploading 2-3 demo products. It is then the owner’s responsibility to fill it with their own products. Of course, this can be assigned to the web developer or studio, but it is a separate service.
This task can be solved much cheaper and simpler because the work of a store operator who just uploads products by filling out forms is much less expensive than the qualified labor of a programmer.
Therefore, it is best to understand and agree in advance on what will be done and what will become additional services at the client’s discretion.
Of course, promoting the website after its creation is a completely separate service, and this issue must be discussed separately.
Agreeing on Deadlines
Frankly speaking, many web studios like to drag out the time, especially if it is paid. But in reality, if the website is being created on a content management system, it can realistically be done in just a week. This will be a high-quality, not rushed job, without any hurry.
Additional languages usually take a lot of time. It’s not the same as creating another website, but consider it as half of that. Because essentially, you have to repeat all the work, even though you already know where everything is, what to translate, and what to replace.
At the same time, we have often encountered colleagues who do not adhere to deadlines at all. Yes, such cases exist. Check and steer clear of them. To be clear, we have created about 20 websites from scratch in the past year, which are in our portfolio. Now, how many times do you think we missed deadlines? Not once, not by a single day! Ask the owners of any of these resources yourself.
Contract
Nowadays, there are many possible forms of contracts for work. But we prefer the simplest one. After discussing all the details with the client, we make a final offer. We send a quote, which details what we are obliged to do and how much it costs.
The client, on their part, accepts the offer by paying the invoice. And receives what we committed to deliver. It’s simple and clear. And absolutely transparent.
However, this option is more suitable for simple projects with a timeline from a few hours to a week and a maximum of a month. For longer-term collaborations, yes, a contract verified by lawyers is needed.
In any case, no serious person will work based on a verbal agreement alone. The scope of work and its cost must be documented.
Process Control
We don’t know about others, but we practice complete transparency. In most cases, the client can observe from the sidelines, day by day, how their site is gradually being created step by step.
Our signature style is to work backwards. That is, we start with the simplest: the contact page. Then the company section. Next, the catalog, store, or real estate listing. And the very last is the main page.
The thing is, we not only install ready-made components or write code but also create the initial content. This means that we gradually gather information about the client’s project, communicating with them, and step by step prepare for the most important part—the main, most significant, selling, and promoting page.
Thus, almost always, if the site is created from scratch, the entire process can be observed in real time. Perhaps not all web developers allow clients to see their process. But we do it transparently, we have nothing to hide.
Evaluation of Results
Unfortunately, no one can ever guess what the client wants in the end, what they will like or dislike. Therefore, the correct approach is to leave room for maneuver. Also, we know that creating something perfectly without any errors the first time is unlikely. Compare it with the Windows system, or any software you use. Developers regularly release updates.
In programming, it’s customary to release an alpha version first, then a beta, and finally the final version. We do the same with the websites we create from scratch. First, we complete what we committed to in the contract within the agreed timeframe and present the client with an alpha version of the finished product.
Then, within a reasonable period, the client can tell us what and how they would like to change or correct based on their tastes and preferences. We are ready to sit with them, usually virtually, as we work worldwide, and make the necessary changes. We also add something by agreement.
Usually, this process takes from one hour to several days. Some want 2-3 changes. Others prepare entire Word documents with screenshots and explanations. We try to do as much as possible.
And finally, the end. After such a review, we consider the project completed and move it to the beta stage. We offer a one-month warranty on all projects, during which we still make necessary adjustments and fix identified errors if they are found.
In this matter, we don’t know how other web studios behave. So we’ve described how we handle it. Because we strive to be the best.
Subsequent Support
What happens when the project is finished? This is a question you should definitely ask before agreeing to work with a web studio. The fact is that many of them aim not just to complete their work but also to turn the client into a cash cow, so to speak.
In reality, a well-executed project should not require any further involvement from the developer. However, if something goes wrong, for instance, due to reasons beyond anyone’s control, such as the site becoming a target of spammers or something else happening, the web studio should be able to quickly come to your aid.
Additionally, over time, you might need to add something new to your project and business as they grow. Of course, the developer can come back and help elevate your resource to a new level.
But generally, those who order a website need to understand that no web studio can attach a “Money” button to it, which, when pressed, guarantees passive income and a comfortable life. We would definitely do that for you if it were possible, but it just doesn’t work that way!
Every business requires promotion and development, and a website is no exception.
