What You Should be Asking

July 30, 2013

When hiring a developer, many people don’t know what questions they should be asking – if they knew, then they’d probably be doing the work themselves, right?

First and foremost – ask for examples of previous projects. The surefire way to weed out the novices is to look at their previous work. How much of it is there? Are they still being used and updated? An experienced web developer will have worked on dozens of projects.

Next, call their clients. Generally they don’t mind and it’s a great way to gauge how they treat their clients and the actual scope of their involvement on any given project.

Is your web developer using CSS3 and HTML5? These are the latest in web trends and, by now, everyone should be using them. Along those same lines is your developer creating responsive designs? Responsive means that the website displays correctly on all devices, from desktops to smartphones. The website should alter its display properties seamlessly when viewing on different devices.

Is the deposit refundable? If not, that might be an indication that the developer knows their product might not be satisfactory. Nothing short of a 100% satisfaction guarantee will do. If you don’t have a website, you should not have to pay.

What other languages does the developer code in? A quality developer will work with several languages. These include: PHP, Ruby, Perl, ASP, Python, etc…?

This should get anyone started and you should have a good idea of how experienced your developer actually is before writing a check.

Preloading Images with Jquery

There are times when preloading images is an important step in keeping your site/page/program running smoothly. This is especially true in the era of mobile. Here’s a cute little snippet that does just that. function preload(yourarrayOfImages) { $(yourarrayOfImages).each(function(){ $(‘<img/>’)[0].src = this; }); } preload([ ‘img/image1.jpg’, ‘img/image2.jpg’, ‘img/image3.jpg’ ]);

Good one on Sitelinks

Sitelinks also factor into your ad rank, and can influence the position of your ad on search page. Ad Rank previously took into account your max cost-per-click (CPC) and quality score, and now ad extensions and formats are another component of the calculation. Seems like a no-brainer to implement,

A Quick Way To Kill Your Facebook Marketing

Facebook is a powerful tool. With millions upon millions of reachable users it is the social media powerhouse. Sharing content is incredibly easy and businesses can so easily engage potential customers that many businesses are putting it to work for them. There are, in fact, many ways to

Gatorland Kubota Has A New Website

A great new site for a great company with new ownership. Gatorland Kubota sells and services all kinds of farm and lawn equipment. A family owned and operated business there is no doubt that they want the best for their customers. After all, they chose livewire didn’t they?

Fraternity Management Has a New Website

Fraternity management needed something up quickly and something that was affordable. Glad to know that they chose us as their Gainesville Web Design team. Additional to the website they requested a simple program that managed their payment modules. As experienced PHP developers, we were able to quickly put

Lawn Enforcement Agency Has A New Website

Lawn Enforcement came to us in need of some SEO advice. They were paying another company several hundred dollars per month and getting nowhere. We noted that there were many, many site structural problems with their current design and all the probably needed was a new site and