In today's episode, we talk about the critical skill of working out whether your web guy or gal is cut out to be doing the right thing by you and your business. This is a great episode today and builds on Darryl's more than 20 years of industry experience.

 

 

 

Resources for this Episode

Darryl:                    Welcome to My Bloody Website, the show where we talk all things online for small or medium business owners, or executives, who still refer to their bloody website. I'm one of your hosts, Darryl King.

Edmund:                And I'm Edmund Pelgen.

Darryl:                    Hello, Edmund. Good to have you here.

Edmund:                Hey, Darryl. An episode right up your alley today. What are we talking about?

Darryl:                    Well, episode 10. Rating your web guy or gal.

Edmund:                Nice.

Darryl:                    Yeah, it's probably a follow-on. We did rating your SER a while back.

Edmund:                I think a lot of people are going to be interested in this one, because this is a challenge that they face every day, you know?

Darryl:                    Sorry, I was a bit out of focus. I was feeling blue.

Edmund:                Can't have that!

Darryl:                    Alright, so we're getting into the business end of 2018 now. We're heading towards the end of the holiday period, we'll shortly have our Australia Day weekend and everyone will be absolutely 100% back in the business. So why don't we crack on and [inaudible 00:01:00] episode over.

Edmund:                Excellent. So I'm gonna start this by asking a bunch of questions about it, because I'm gonna step into the shoes of the business owner who needs a new website, it's 2018. My biggest question is what am I looking for? Because I always see this thing online of people calling themselves web developers and web designers, and you Google web developer and you see one thing, and designer, and people use those terms interchangeably. Now, am I doing the right thing by asking a web developer to build my website? Help me out here.

Darryl:                    Yeah, that's a good question Ed. I don't think there's a clear answer, because I don't know that everyone necessarily defines themselves properly. In an ideal world, you'd be able to gauge that. I remember in our last episode, I believe, you spoke about ... you were looking for someone, and you went to lots of websites and when you got to the one, they told you exactly what they did. So I think the key thing there is understanding, finding out what the people do. But in my way of thinking, a designer and a developer are potentially different things.

Edmund:                Right.

Darryl:                    So a designer ... and there's probably three tiers. There's design, and there's front-end coding or development, and then there's back-end. So design is what it sounds like. Someone that's a designer is orientated around creating the visual design. And they, hopefully, will have experience in a number of things, like they'll understand design principles for mobile conversion, optimization, UX and all those things. That's more detailed stuff. But design would work in Photoshop predominantly, or Illustrator, somewhere like that but probably Photoshop. And they would create PSD files from Photoshop ...

Edmund:                What's a PSD file?

Darryl:                    A PSD file is from Photoshop. That's the output file from Photoshop.

Edmund:                Alright.

Darryl:                    So if, say, you went to 99designs or somewhere like that and engaged a designer, they would be just a designer. So if you went looking for "I want a website design", right, and you engage someone to do a website design,