What do you look for in a web developer?

uplinked said:
OK, but if a guy comes into my autoshop with a dead battery, and he's talking about how he'd love to race NASCAR someday (but doesn't even know what a muffler is), I'm not about to shoot down his dreams. I'll do the shitty little job I was contracted for, even though I know I'm capable of rebuilding engines, and I don't have the heart to tell this guy that with his severe case of retardation, he'll never even reach 30mph.
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I think most mechanics would start laughing and tell them they will do the job, but they will never make NASCAR in this piece of shit.

uplinked said:
But, if he leaves, and I start fixing his dead battery, and he calls me fifteen minutes later screaming "WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY ROCKET THRUSTERS?", then that's a dead-beat client. Crazy, insane, asking for the moon, and I'll politely ask him to come pick up his car -- but at this point, I'm lucky if he even pays me for the battery I installed.
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This is why you should have a full scope of work written for each client and collect at least 50% of payment up front. "Were rocket boosters agreed to in our scope of work? Nope. Those will cost extra."

uplinked said:
Also, automechanic/lawyer analogy is fundamentally fail -- Neither of these professions ever takes on work for revshare, because the final product is not expected to be profitable. You tell a mechanic "make my car work" and you tell a lawyer "keep me out of prison", and these are both established, measurable metrics. If a client asks you to "finish" a site, or "improve" the code, who gets to judge what's "realistic" and what's egregious?
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Uh, lawyers work on "revshare" all the time (contingency fees)- when you sue someone, for example, they get a percentage of the amount awarded, usually 1/3. The final product- the outcome of the case- is definitely expected to be profitable in this case, or the lawyer makes nothing, unless he has an hourly rate.

If you are taking a project offering revshare, you shouldn't take the work unless you believe the project will be a success, just as a lawyer wouldn't take a case unless he thinks he can win (or he gets paid anyway by an hourly rate).
 


Be careful before working with web developers/designers.

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As others have said, communication is the #1 stumbling block when dealing with a web developer. I need someone who can speak plain english and explain to me the benefits of downfalls of designing my vision. I also want someone who looks out for me and points out when there is a glaring problem with my draft that he's coding - someone who's proactive.
 
Rage9, specifically directed at you because I know you're a strong coder (and are capable of building complex backends, etc), it might also be worth paying attention to the "programmer"/"designer" boundary.

If you want to one-man a project and do your own layout, that's cool, but I realized a while ago that I'm simply an awful designer, and if I try to focus on "making it look good", my code suffers (and vice versa). Nowadays, when starting a project from scratch, I work on getting it feature-functional as fast as possible, and then pay someone to do a design (or tell my client to). I make it very, very clear to my clients that my job is to ensure the code works and performs, and that I can do this on par with the best in my field, but that the elements they see on the page will not be resized, re-aligned, re-colored or re-worded unless they pay a designer to do it. My days of responding to thirty-page emails full of verbage/HTML changes ("Move that five pixels down") are long behind me, and usually clients are happy to hear that I insist on using my time doing the "hardest" work I'm capable of.

I guess, to summarize all of my posts, the most important thing in contracting yourself out is "boundaries". Maintain'em.
 
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