Building a team: you need people with skills!
A good web development project nearly always has the following necessary roles:- Sales person – helps generate new customers for the business
- Project architect – develops the overall concept of the project (not the design)
- Project manager – manages the project and keeps everything on track
- Site designer – designs the look and functionality of the site
- Back-end developer – creates the framework the site interface will be placed on
- Front-end developer – creates and implements interface components
- Site tester – ideally does everything possible to try and break the site until it can be broken no more.
- UI specialist – works with front end developers to make more awesome interfaces
- UX specialist – extensively examines the human factors of a site to ensure a good user experience
- SEO specialist – determines (and possibly implements) an SEO strategy
- Content writer – provides high quality text content
- Graphic designer – creates custom graphics
Who does what?
The first logical step is to determine your own role in the team.You may be tempted at this stage, since you're the business owner, to automatically assume you should also be the project architect and project manager, since the names of those roles implies leadership. [pullquote]Never let your ego get in the way of good business decisions[/pullquote] But stop and think for a moment… is this your strength? If you see yourself as more of a coder or an illustrator, then it may be wise to consider delegating the management roles to somebody with more experience or ability in those roles and taking responsibility for the area of expertise where you are strongest. Never let your ego get in the way of good business decisions. Now you come to the fun part, which is also by far the most difficult part.It is time to select your co-workers. The first thing to know about this is that it's usually better to maintain a permanent core team who perform the same roles in each project, and when necessary you can consider bringing in additional freelance workers on a temporary basis to fill special needs of a project. If you have to mess around building new teams for every project, you'll waste more time and spend more money, and occasionally you'll get disappointing results. You could even lose clients. So find people that you like and trust, and make them a permanent part of your team.Finding good team members
The mistake that many people make when hiring is to define lists of skills that are too complex and too restrictive. Sometimes hiring managers don't even understand the role. For example, here are the requirements listed for a recently advertised front-end developer role:- Minimum 3 years experience in PHP development
- Minimum 3 years experience in SQL/MySQL
- Proficient in WordPress, custom themes, plugins, widgets, HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery.
- Understand basic Unix CLI
- Experience working with GIT
- Experience with unit testing and QA
- Strong knowledge of Unix Administration
- Good knowledge of UI design
- Experience with Agile Scrum methodology (essential)
- Strong documentation skills
- Experience in email marketing, SEO, and Social Media
- Ability to write custom JavaScript code
- Familiarity with CSS
- Ability to think on your feet
Grow your team and your business at a sustainable rate
Most small development agencies should be able to fill all the required core roles with just 3 or 4 staff, appointing freelancers where necessary. As your business grows, you should start to think about narrowing down the tasks that each person has to cover and creating a bigger team. Try to avoid developing a corporate hierarchy and culture. That kind of thing is what leads to the stagnation and failure of creative businesses; with an hierarchical structure, you get competition between your staff, you get people being promoted up to their level of incompetence, and you get divisiveness. What you really want is everyone having equality within the organization, no major differences in pay between people with different roles, and everyone feeling like they make a valuable contribution to the success of the team. In this way you can ensure you have an effective development team who will grow your business and expand your portfolio more quickly. Featured image, teamwork image via Shutterstock.Emma Grant
Emma Grant is a professional freelance content writer from Ireland. Over the past three years she has travelled the world while running her business from her laptop. You find her at www.florencewritinggale.com
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