An interesting question arose in a recent discussion about web development rates, how do you know if you're paying too much for services?

Here's some background about the discussion: The person I spoke with works at a large company that has what was described as an excellent in house web development team. The person works directly with the developers and in general is pleased with the end result and service, however they wanted to know if there is a 'standard' way of measuring the quality of the programming and if the work being done at their company warrants the high fees. The person admitted that since they don't have a technical background, they feel illequipped to asses the development work. It's interesting to note that the person doesn't feel this way about assessing the value of design work.

As the owner of a web design and development company, I understand where this person is coming from. Design is something everyone can see and tell what's well designed, web development though is a harder area to assess if you can't appreciate what it takes to create online programming...or is it?

It is true that the price range for web development varies widely depending on the programming language, accumulated skills, experience level and customer service of the programmer. It takes years of study and painstaking trial and error to create great scaleable code. Web development isn't just about creating a function, it's about creating a function that fits seamlessly into the existing logic of a system and is flexible to future changes. A programmer who keeps future development in mind will save the client time and money on future work. Leaving current programming ready to easily add on new functions as opposed to having to go back and redo old work is very important, not taking this into consideration makes adding new functions to the overall 'logic' of the system time consuming and prone to problems.

This all may sound obvious, but a novice web depveloper learns how to do this with years of experience, this is not something they teach you at college. In fact, there is such an enormous amount of skills and knowledge that is needed to be a great web developer, that it couldn't possibly fit into those student years. This is what a client gains when working with an experienced programmer as opposed to a developer who is just starting out. Aswell as being able to master tasks that a beginner couldn't, an experienced, super star programmer would do it in far less time. Although the hourly rate for the professional could be at least twice the beginner, the altogether time investment would be much less and the reliability of the work greater.

Comparing experienced to starting out programmers reminds me of so many phone conversations we've had with clients who come to us after having had frustrating experiences with service providers that disappointed them because they lacked the skills or the organization to deliver. Basing your choice of developer on price alone is not a reliable benchmark. A low price for web development could mean the programmer is likely inexperienced or under qualified for the work. Likewise expensive fees could simply be expensive to give the impression that the work is equal to the fee whether it is or not.

So how does a non-programmer judge web development? Although there is no formal, standard way to asses programming, some common sense methods can be used:

• Does the work get done in a timely manner?

• Does it work well?

• Is the developer responsive to fixing bugs?

• Does the developer offer great customer service? Are they available to speak?

• Do they come up with great solutions to solve problems?

If your answer is astoundingly yes to all of these points than you can feel good about your service provider.

Before hiring a developer, I would recommend getting references/recommendations and taking a look at their work yourself to see bottom line, does it work well.

In the end of the day, the client wants their web development to work well without problems, higher fees for excellent work is always worth it to the client.