A sense of mystique is cool, right? It’s the aloofness we adopt when we’re sitting alone in a café, or nodding amiably to music our friends play for us, eager to see what we think. This trait, however, does not bode well for web design. Transparency is essential to getting what you paid for, and a developer should wear their heart on their sleeve at each stage of the process.
By hiding mistakes and keeping the details from you, a coder can paste over some serious flaws. These are the top 4 things that might be going amiss under your nose:
1. They don’t understand your brand
In the preliminary step of your relationship, a developer should put the kettle on, sit down and ask a lot of questions about your vision. They must try to ‘get’ the brand and its journey to this moment – what you believe in, how you work and (crucially) the competitor websites you’ve identified for comparison.
Otherwise, they could miss the mark entirely when it comes to building your site. The likelihood is that the finished product won’t have a distinctive enough flavour to separate it from the herd.
2. Bugs galore!
No-one is safe from a digital pest. There are hundreds of lines of code that formulate even the most basic web endeavours, so bugs are a common problem, weaselling into the gaps in a coding sequence. If your developer isn’t upfront about bug testing, then you’ll probably have a glitchy, crash-happy website on your hands.
3. The framework is a mess
Aesthetic choices are a big part of web development, especially since they can wow a client in the prototype stage. However, it is the basic form of the site that will determine its success. If it hasn’t got a well-planned framework, then the whole project won’t have the substance it needs for consumer engagement. So make sure any developer has a firm handle on the navigation of your site.
4. Cross-channel incompatibility
The modern website cannot limit itself to one digital avenue. More people than ever are browsing on their tablets and smartphones, which is why a developer has to factor in mobile compatibility across the board.
A site’s user experience should be tweaked for smaller screens and different browsers, granting easy and responsive benefits for touch-based devices. To birth an un-optimised web platform is basically saying that these users don’t matter, turning them away when they might have put cash in your pocket.
Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse behind the curtain of web design, it’s about time that you took on a coding team who never beat around the bush. The Code Guy’s mandate has always been to lay our cards out on the table – if we run into problems, we tell you immediately, since that’s the only way things can be resolved and bettered under your careful watch.
Just give us a call to see what a thorough approach we’ll take to your next project…