How to order the development of the site without unpleasant surprises: 3 expert advice

At first glance, choosing a contractor for web development is not so difficult. There are many options on the market, but it is often this variety that often creates problems. It is difficult for customers to navigate the ocean of offers, when 50 and 500 thousand rubles can be asked for the same job.

In this topic, I decided to collect practical tips on choosing a web studio from experts of the development market.
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What expenses to prepare for

Dozens of articles on a variety of resources have been written about what makes up the cost of developing a site. Thus, Alexander Bardin, the managing partner of the Aquatos studio, calculated the cost in an article on VC, taking into account the average salaries of web-studio specialists, deductions from these salaries, office costs and depreciation of equipment, advertising and company profits.

Specialist "cheated" the price of creating a site with standard functionality, and not an online store or a major portal. According to these data, the cost of a corporate website ordered in a web studio cannot cost less than 125 thousand rubles. Given the fact that the material was published in 2016, now the price is unlikely to be less than 150 thousand.

How to determine which studio does not need to work

WebProfy's technical director Denis Korovkin in an article on Rb.ru talked about how customers define a web studio in advance that they shouldn’t work with. The expert has identified more than ten points, among which, for example, there are:

• Low prices - if you are offered a price that is clearly lower than the cost price (you can calculate it using the formula in the paragraph above), then this means that the company will seriously save on everything.
• Constantly growing budget - experimental development should be able to more or less accurately estimate the cost of work. If the company first calls a low price to attract, and then constantly increases it already in the course of work, it is not worth cooperating with such developers.
• Lack of a plan - any cooperation with developers begins with the development of the TOR and a work plan.
• Inattention to the content - if you are given a site filled with test content (lorem ipsum), and not one that will be placed on it as a result, you should wait for problems. The fact that when you add larger texts or pictures in a different format, the whole layout goes, you will find out too late.
• Low speed of work - if your project was too small for the studio, and it was taken to the heap, then work for larger customers will always be a priority. As a result, all important business deadlines can be disrupted. To understand that everything will be exactly this way, comparing your company with the average client of the chosen studio - if you are far less out of it, you should not wait for an individual approach.

What should be done before and after site development

Head of Mahaon studio Vladimir Buzkiv wrote an article for VC on how to optimize development costs . In his opinion, this can be done if attention is paid to preparation.

In particular, if it is assumed that the site will work with some systems of the company (DB, CRM), then the API for access to them should be ready in advance. Then developers will be able to quickly perform the tasks of integrating the site with these resources. If the API itself cannot be prepared, at least their detailed specifications should be created.

In addition, the expert advises to immediately plan the activity after the launch of the site. The site needs to be updated, filled with content, bring people to it, collect analytics and work on conversion. Therefore, it is logical to agree with the studio, which developed it for further support of the project.

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And what do you think, what else you need to know in order to order the development of the site without problems?