Vetting a Web Dev Firm

There are an awful lot of web design/development firms or agencies out there and a disheartening percentage are just terrible at what they do. It is common to find firms that fail at both the design AND development though often more common to find a place with decent designs that is utterly incapable of writing code, while claiming they can code just fine. They just can’t implement their designs unless the implementation is done via huge images or flash.

Here are a few questions for vetting firms with the goal of purging the truly unqualified ones. These questions are based on actual experiences where the lack of understanding was so complete that I felt embarrassed for them. They can come in handy when looking for a firm to assist with some work.

Filtering the Worst

In what country is your coding done?

Generally I want to hear USA (point being – same country I am in). There are exceptions and I don’t want to get into my broader feelings on offshoring but that is what I need to hear.

What is DNS? Have you ever updated a DNS record?

Don’t care at all about getting a technically correct explanation here. I just want to get a feeling that they understand domains don’t magically point at the right place and that they could handle making simple adjustments when I don’t control the domain.

Using only notepad, textedit, or similar, write a page that has the following:

• a green div
• a button underneath that div
• some Javascript that toggles the green div from visible to not visible when the button is clicked

You would likely be amazed at how many agencies this would blow the minds of.

Do you know the difference between GET and POST? When would you generally use each of those?

Want to find general understanding here. Not concerned about a complete, technically correct answer but just want to hear vague familiarity.

Do you know what SSH, SCP, or SFTP are?

Them being familiar at all with just one of these is sufficient. A similar question is how would you get files on a server without FTP?

What are steps you could take to speed up the load time of a page?

At a minimum, hoping for an understanding that reducing the size of pictures/images helps. Beyond that mentions of caching, combining/compressing Javascript, not using every Javascript framework in existence, content distribution networks, or whatever else are icing on the cake.

What is the difference between server side and client side code? What would you personally prefer for each?

Basic blocks here but there are firms with paying customers that could not answer this question well.

Follow Up Questions

Only if the above completely trivial questions can be answered with some confidence should you consider asking follow up questions. Some ideas:

• How do you structure your code/css?
• What do you use for version control?
• Let me see some stuff you have worked on.
• What libraries do you commonly use?

I am not kidding when I say that I know of professional agencies that cannot answer a single question from that first set satisfactorily. Don’t assume the basics. You have to start from nothing when considering a web dev firm or else you might find yourself in a painful situation down the road. There are some excellent firms out there that can really get good work done so don’t take this as a blanket statement covering them all. It is just fair warning that you have to be careful when looking for someone to work on your stuff.