Hiring Freelancer Designers or Developers to build your business
July 30, 2008
After working with other designers, coders and developers over the past years I thought I’d put together an article about this. The way that I wanted to setup Pure Web Analytics was a business that works with its client base ongoing over the life of their web based business systems. Freelancing projects to different coders can be dangerous to businesses building their reputation online because you are only as good as your last designer or coder.
For some business owners this works but I’ve seen my share of projects where a coder or designer left a project and the person who paid for it had no clue of the work that was actually done and what was left remaining. When the next coder showed up it had to be re-coding from scratch and the cycle repeats itself over and over again.
Pros of Hiring
I don’t want to learn HTML, CSS, PHP or ASP and I don’t have to!
One of the biggest pros of hiring a freelance programmer or designer is that they do all the coding or designing and you just sit back and pay them. It can be simple and stress free to hire coders to work on your projects, update your website or perform any number of other tasks that you need help with.
Finding a skilled professional with a skill set that is hard to find locally
When it comes to hiring for a specific project where the skillet required is outside what anyone locally can provide for you, hiring a freelancer can work to your benefit.
It’s cheaper hiring a freelancer
When you are hiring a freelancer you don’t need to worry about paying those benefits, other overhead costs or anything associated to keeping an employee other then the cost of having them working on the project.
Cons of Hiring
Who owns what code or design work?
This is an issue that gets sticky depending on how you attack this issue. Naturally as companies develop proprietary web software with their freelance developers this becomes something that the business depends on and this is one way in which problems can arise.
How talented is my freelancer?
Some freelancers come off as gurus and after you read their resume, look at some of their samples you are ready to make the effort to purchase their services. Once you before involved in the project you realize that they don’t know what they are talking about and that they cannot help you. Money is lost, expectations are lost and you are lost as to who to hire next?
Where did my freelancer go?
Sometimes freelancers just disappear off the face of the planet never to be seen or heard from again. When some freelancers feel a project is complete to their standards and not the standards of the customer paying for their services they simply stop responding. They stop sending emails. They stop working for you on your projects. Your only real course of action is to either sue them or higher another freelance professional to finish the project.
Where does my freelancer live?
Choosing a freelancer means selecting who you want to work with based on their location. Some people don’t mind hiring a freelance coder or designer from
Whether you choose to work with a freelancer or not these are a few points to keep in mind when you are considering how to hire for your project. Not all web professionals are created equal and sometimes spending a little more you are able to achieve the things that you need to run a successful business online or adding a web channel to your current business.
Other options instead of outsourcing your projects to a freelancer
Do It Yourself
This is a favourite of many entrepreneurs and small business owners out there but unless you are a web developer you may be better off spending the money to have someone build your website over trying to learn everything yourself
Staff your company internally
If your company is large enough to support a full time or part time web designer or developer then this might be your best bet. This way they are an official employee of your company and running off with the secret source code becomes much harder.
Find a development firm to manage your projects and complete them.
Finding a solution provider, design agency or company that specifically can help you build your business’ web site is another great option. That is actually what Pure Web Analytics is designed for and the niche we meet we don’t choose to work with a lot of companies because we want to provide excellent support and development to our clients, they in turn pay for it but they get value from knowing that we only work with a certain amount of clients. Being structured this way allows us to remain competitive and selective about the people we hire and the projects that we take on.
That being said i think that there are many excellent freelance web designers, developers and usability experts out there and maybe in the near future Pure Web Analytics will showcase some of the hottest talent from around the web for your viewing pleasure!
How to Create a PayPal Sandbox Account
July 18, 2008
I’ve been using PayPal for the last couple of years for buying, invoicing and receiving payments from customers. As websites and web site design and development continue to increase PayPal has become the way to accept payment for a lot of businesses, possibly yours as well. It has also become very customizable to meet the growing and changing demands of its customer base to the point where you can customize it in any fashion you’d like. And with this ability comes the PayPal Sandbox account.
What does “Sandbox” mean?
Sandbox refers to a term used in development that allows developers or users to test their PayPal system and greatly customize it. You can see why this is a great idea if you’ve ever tried to test a third party application like PayPal.
Why should I get a PayPal Sandbox Account?
If you work with PayPal, have an ecommerce site that uses PayPal or you are interested in testing PayPal then getting a PayPal Sandbox Account is a good idea because it allows you to test transactions, understand the flow of how a transaction process occurs and figure out difficult bugs with your ecommerce platform.
Where can I get a PayPal Sandbox account?
You can get a PayPal Sandbox account by clicking here…
With more then 100,000,000 people using PayPal it makes sense that businesses want to offer this as a payment option to their customers and as a way to run their business.
Luc
Top 10 Reasons Why Customers Abandon Their Shopping Carts
May 13, 2008
I wrote a brief article about Multi-page checkouts versus Single or “One Page” checkouts the other day and I wanted to follow-up with some reasons that people such as the customers and potential customers on your websites right now abandon their shopping carts. It is probably the biggest problem faced by anyone running an e-commerce based company today. So what factors affect people from spending on your web site? Well…
- Cost of shipping too high and not shown until checkout
- Changed mind and discarded cart contents
- Comparison shopping or browsing
- Total cost of items is too high
- Saving items for later purchase
- Checkout process is too long
- Out of stock products at checkout time
- Checkout requires too much personal information
- Poor site navigation and long download times
- Lack of sufficient product or contact information
Source: SurveyPro
As you can see “Time is Money” as I stated in my original article and overall success in e-commerce weighs heavily on the cost of purchasing and the time in which is takes to do it. Just something to think about if you run an ecommerce business
Luc
Multi-page Checkout vs. One Page Checkout – Time is money
May 7, 2008
In the e-commerce world, much like any other world, time is money. A great deal of e-commerce sites are built in such a way where you search for a product, click to “proceed to checkout” and then you enter the checkout process where you sometimes have to create a profile before you are able to buy the product you are interested in and then you have to enter your delivery information, what type of shipping you would like and then you credit card you would like to pay with and then lastly process the transaction.
Sounds tiring and I wonder if customers give up at certain points during the checkout. I can personally say that I have decided not to buy a product online before because they made it too hard to buy the product so what makes your customers so different? It’s just a little “food for thought” when you are viewing your sales funnels and cart abandonment rate and wondering why are customers dropping off at certain points in the online sales process. Check out the One Page checkout…
Luc
Using Internal Site Search in Google Analytics
March 27, 2008
In an article that I wrote back in February of this year entitled “Calculating Internal Site Search Metrics in Google Analytics” I talked about various metrics that Google Analytics uses for its Site Search feature. I decided to write a follow up article to discuss actually creating an internal site search that Google Analytics can track.
Internal Site Search is an interesting concept that allows, you, as the website owner to view the behaviours of visitors to your website when they search on your web site. It’s another useful tool that is open to anyone who has the time and wants to understand how their customers, visitors and audience in general use their website’s search capabilities.
In order to use internal site search you need to enable this feature in Google Analytics by taking the following steps…
- Login to your Google Analytics Account
- Click “Edit” beside the website profile you’d like to add internal site searching on
- Select “Do search my website” option on the following page and leave the other options as they are defaulted to.
- Set a query parameter
- Click Save
In your results page without setting up internal site search you cannot segment the search traffic on your website. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what your customers searched for when they were on your website.
By choosing, “Yes, strip query parameters out of URL” this tells Google Analytics to remove your search results from showing up in the Content Reports of your Google Analytics account
Or by choosing, “No, do not strip query parameters out of URL” this tells Google Analytics to include your search results from the internal site search into your Content Reports in Google Analytics. By default this option is set for you when you enable Site Search in your Google Analytics account.
When using Google Analytics method for doing internal site search it is important to understand just how and where Google Analytics pulls the data from to calculate internal site searches.
Luc
