Bad-Developer Syndrome
The search for a web designer / web developer can be a painful process for someone with a business model, but little-to-no web experience. The market is filled with people who talk big, quote small, and develop poorly.
Development usually begins quickly with little, or no, written planning. Victims of BDS notice an accelerating erosion of their confidence as their developer’s response time and quality deteriorates. They hear things like “We have already used all the hours we quoted you” and “…Drupal doesn’t do that”.
At some point the client will realize that it is in their best interest to cut their losses and find someone new.
New questions arise at this point like “Can my old developer get revenge by erasing everything?” and “They did a lot of work, If you can’t just fix what is there, I hope we can use some of the code”.
One of the main reasons for the prevalence of bad developers is that simple web coding is not that difficult. Each piece of the web-application puzzle (XHTML for example) can be done by a novice with passable results (or be elevated to an art form). Putting all the pieces together into a user-friendly web-application requires a high level of technical and artistic knowledge, excellent communication, and experience. This combination is hard to find even at the top, established agencies.
Confusing the developer search even more is the huge range of price quotes you will get from different sources.
- Agencies with offices, full time staff and marketing expenses need to charge a lot of money for even simple sites
- Craigslisters charge very little and take jobs that they don’t know how to do.
- Freelancers like myself fall somewhere in between.