Interactive News

Are you trying to hire a WordPress developer. Shopping around to find the best price and get the best results can be daunting. There are so many things to consider it can be hard to figure out where to start. The most popular Content Management System (CMS) with the best features, tools, and reliability is undoubtedly WordPress. With all the goodies it offers, you won’t be stuck with a cookie cutter site – especially if you hire an expert WordPress developer like Ontarget Interactive! You don't want a cookie cutter website What is a cookie cutter site you ask? Well, let’s look at it like building a house using a WordPress developer as the builder. You don’t want your “house” looking like all the others in your area, right? Sure, you will have the normal components of a “door” that links to the main “rooms” (pages), and “windows” to let fresh air in (a form page to gather data”, and “hallways” that link to smaller “rooms” like closets or the laundry (or pages like blogs, testimonials, products, and examples). You don’t want it to look like the only difference between your house and another is the numbers on the mailbox. Those kinds of houses (I mean websites) are built by drag and drop CMS platforms to create the same style and functionality of a cookie cutter. The frosting may look different, but the ingredients are the same. It’s important to have consistency and a good structure that is familiar to users. You want to make it easy for them to navigate your website. Your house will have a front door (header) and standard rooms (pages like About, Products, Services, etc.). Hiring a WordPress developer like Ontarget, can transform your house into a profitable, one-of-a-kind investment property. A property with unique features and customizations you'll need to impress your customers. Bottom line, you want your website to be reliable, responsive, and fast. How do I tell if I hired a good WordPress Developer? Because we told you we’re the best! Just kidding. I mean, we are, but just in case you want to shop around, here are some questions to ask (and the answers to look for): How do you ensure security of my website and data? A WordPress developer should answer with things like proper coding, choosing good vendors for themes, updating site content, security patches, software, and plug-ins regularly. Security has nothing to do with a pretty website. At Ontarget, we provide full website management services that includes server software updates, security patch updates, CMS updates, plug-in updates, and more. As an added blanket of security, our web development team works hard to keep on top of security risks, cyber-attacks, and hacking threats. With us, you can be assured that we are taking all the necessary security precautions that often require site and platform updates. We monitor your site and as soon as it has a problem we jump on it to get it back up and running. How do you back up my site data? Look for terminology like files and plugins are synced and backed up on regular basis, on a secure cloud service, and/or on a private server. You should have access to your back ups. Restoring should be able to be done in less than 15 min..Unlike many hosting companies, we monitor your site and frequently check to make sure your site is backed up and running correctly – with no additional fee as it is already included in our website management service. How many years of experience should they have? If you hire a WordPress developer, they should have at least 2 to 3 years of consistent experience. It takes time and regular practice to understand the platform.Ontarget has been building WordPress websites for more than 15 years. We are US-based and extremely well-versed in all WordPress components including plug-ins, widgets, apps, integration, SEO services, tools, and special features. Not only do we build custom websites and customize existing themes, but we can also add WooCommerce so you can have a full-fledged online shopping site. Do you provide child themes? Think of this like you’re decorating your house for different holiday seasons. The house has the same functionality, but there are different decorations, paint colors, and maybe some fun polls and pictures, or access to a special room – like a mother-in-law suite. The developer should ask what kinds of themes you had in mind for the “child”. What the functionality will be, how often you want to use them, and what kinds of tweaks will be made. Be sure to ask if the child themes are included in the price given by your developer!Since we love to help people learn and grow, Ontarget guides you through the platform so you can easily make updates if you choose to manage your content yourself. We can customize any theme and tailor our services to your brand and the content you produce. What is your process for developing a WordPress site? A WordPress developer should request a meeting with you to get to know your business, vision, and overall purpose of having the website created. Much like an architect, a mock-up should be provided along with the initial color scheme as agreed upon. Once the basic information is laid out, a list of items that need to be provided to the developer should be shared. In the meantime, the developer will work on building the structure and framework.At Ontarget we don’t like surprises anymore than you do, that’s why we involve you in every step of the marketing, design, and development process. Our smaller, US-based, family-owned operation means we can give you more attention. First, we’ll meet with you to get an inside scoop on your business, customers, and competitors. We then design styles and a look-and-feel for your website. Next we get nerdy and play with all the tools and plug-ins to make sure they work with your site. Finally… we launch! Well, kind of, first we finalize all of the parameters and make sure things are perfect. Security is set, the backup is made, and the fine-tuning is done. Then we can launch. If I hire a WordPress Developer, what do you need from me? Content is crucial to the success of any website. Your developer will need information about your products, services, business, history, etc. No website is complete without some photography or other digital art.Ontarget will design your website in any way you desire. That means we’ll need to know what you desire! After the initial consultation where we go over everything, we’ll create a Detailed Requirements Document that we use to build your custom website. This document is like the blueprints to a house. How is ownership handled? When you hire a WordPress developer, they should be willing to hand over complete ownership of the site to you (in writing). If they’ve developed custom work, they may ask you to sign a waiver allowing them to share screenshots or links to your site as part of their portfolio. Additionally, once the work for the website is completed, the developer should give you the tools you need to create changes and maintain the site, hosting, and security as needed.Whatever the agreement is, make sure you are comfortable with it before signing off on it. Make sure it gives you full rights to the intellectual property of your website. Make sure you have access to hosting, WordPress admin, Database, Domain and DNS settings. At Ontarget, you hold all the power, we’re not doing you a favor, we work for you. That means if you want us to carry on managing YOUR website then we will do it. If you want to take complete control YOU’VE got it! We are your humble servants. How do you optimize websites? Hiring a WordPress Developer should mean they can provide you with SEO help. Listen for terms like Google Analytics, SEO checker, Keyword research, Schema and site speed. The WordPress developer should research trending keywords from your competitor sites and use that to optimize your website.Ontarget has a lot of expensive tools and services that they can use on your website. These tools provide an insight on what can be done to improve the optimization of your website. While Google has some trouble crawling some CMS platforms, they recommend WordPress for business sites. Will you provide Domain, Web Hosting, and Security services? The developer should go over each of these features with you and explain any additional costs. If you have any questions about anything regarding hosting and security, be sure to ask. A domain can be purchased relatively cheaply. The thing to remember is that you HAVE to own your domain. The security of your site’s data, including customer information, and web hosting, which serves as the foundation of your “house”, is vital to keep your online presence running smoothly. It should not be something to taken lightly. *See below for more information on things to look for when discussing hosting and security. Does Ontarget help you with your domain, web hosting and site security? In a word: Yup. We employ all the necessary tools your site will need to manage your site. We can help you with your domain/s, reputable hosting, and supreme security. What is your fee structure for regular maintenance, updates, reports, etc. The WordPress developer you hire should provide you with a list of tasks they perform for the regular maintenance. In order to keep a site running smoothly it must kept updated with the latest versions of software. You should also receive monthly analytic reports unless this is something you feel comfortable doing. We can’t speak for other developers, but at Ontarget, the pricing depends on the scoop and magnitude of the work we do. Our standard website management runs $150 a month as of the writing of this article. For that, we will host and monitor your site. If your site goes down, we will work to get your site back up and running. We'll also make updates to WordPress and all the plugins that you have on your site. This price also includes an automated email to you that provides you with site analytics. These 10 questions are just a sample of the questions you can ask before you hire a WordPress developer. Before drafting your interview questions, Google some good questions for developers. You may get a more in-depth look at other things to consider before hiring a WordPress developer: And, not to toot our own horn, but we really have a great line up of web development services.