Unless you happen to be an amazing coder and designer in addition to having savvy business skills, you will eventually need to hire someone or find a contractor to help you with the ever-growing web and mobile world.
Knowing that this can be a challenging undertaking, we’ve compiled some tips on how to improve your chances of succeeding.
Q: Should I hire an employee or just go with outside contractors?
A: If you are just getting occasional work done, then it’s better to go with external contractors. This way you can get exactly the expertise you need, perhaps hiring a separate designer, developer and maybe server admin expert for different parts of your project rather than having to hire a mini-IT department.
Once you start spending big bucks consistently each month, it’s probably time to hire at least one “generalist” in-house tech guru. Try to find someone who has some good design skills and knows at least some coding and the basics of servers and hosting.
Q: I’ve heard you can get great deals outsourcing abroad. Is that OK or is it better to hire locally?
A: There are designers and developers around the world that will do your work for a fraction of what you’d be charged using a local option. Sites that can help facilitate this include www.hiretheworld.com and www.freelancer.ca. This may work for small projects like logo designs and graphics. For more sophisticated web and mobile apps, it gets a lot trickier with remote developers. Sometimes you want someone you can meet, especially if things go wrong.
Q: How much should I pay?
A: This is a tricky one. It might be tempting to go for the bargain hourly rate of an entry-level person rather than paying the big bucks for the local guru, but the only thing more expensive than hiring a top-notch developer is hiring a cheap one. You may be able to pay someone with less experience $20 an hour and it will take him 100 hours for your project for a total of $2,000 or you could pay someone at the top of her game for $200 an hour and it will take her five hours to complete for a total of $1,000 at much better quality.
Q: Can I hire just one person for all my mobile and web needs?
A: Probably not. There are some very talented people that are good at information architecture, design, coding for both the web and mobile, but it’s really rare to have all these diverse skill sets packed into one homo sapiens.
Q: Should I go with a fixed price or an hourly contract?
A: If your project has any kind of ambiguity to it, not many contractors will quote you a fixed price. If they do, they will have to add a big margin to cover the risk of not knowing how long it’s going to take. Once you trust your contractors, hourly rates can work well. If it’s something they have done many times before, they can quote you a fixed price. Make sure you get more than one quote; there can be a huge range in pricing.
Q: Should I go with a web or mobile development firm or just hire freelancers?
A: If you hire a firm, you might get more reliability, project management and professionalism than the lone ranger developer, but it will usually cost a lot more. They have their overheads to cover, and the actual developers and designers make only a fraction of their billable rate. If you are OK with meeting in a cafe with your freelancers and OK that your project might not always be their top priority, then you might have better luck hiring freelancers.
Resources: Wavefront (www.wavefrontac.com) is a mobile focused accelerator and a good place to start to find local mobile talent. Local mobile development companies include Dynamic Leap Technology (www.dynamic-leap.com) and Appnovation (www.appnovation.com).
Meetups: Check out technology Meetups in the Lower Mainland (e.g. www.meetup.com/Vancouver-WordPress-Meetup-Group/). Go to one of the meetings and you’ll soon get a sense of who knows their stuff.
Digital media programs: find talented grads that still have hourly rates that are not yet in the stratosphere. Two great ones are Capilano University’s Interactive Design Lab (www.interactivedesignlab.com/) and BCIT’s New Media and Web Development (www.bcit.ca/study/programs/6415smcert).
Co-working spaces and accelerators: Drop by a local co-working and technology accelerator like Launch Academy (launchacademy.ca), the Hive (hivevancouver.com), the Office (www.theofficevancouver.com) or Zen Launchpad (zenlaunchpad.com). •
