Photo credit: Back when I was in construction building residential homes we had builders that we called “Weekend Warriors”.
Everyone with a hammer thinks they can build a home.
Not saying they did not know what they were doing, but they were doing it in a fashion that gave them a work around the legalities of construction. This allowed them to do the work for cash at cheaper rates. Customer gets a deal and the person doing the work save time and money also. Win Win right, WRONG.
What happens when that roof the “Weekend Warriors” put on fails or has issues? Now that guy is at his real job so he wont return your calls, its pouring rain out and the inside of your house is getting destroyed by the minute.
Insurance will cover it WRONG again, because when they investigate and find out it was an uninsured and unlicensed contractor that did they work they are not going to cover the claim. May even drop you as a client.
Real life experience: I seen a “Weekend Warrior” guy with a hammer, cut a giant hole in a load bearing wall for a patio door and collapse the roof.
Saving money on a project is not always the best option.
Most of the time it costs you more trying to save!
Real builders that are licensed and insured with experience generally know what they are doing and have skills that they can prove in one way or another.
The same goes for web development and web developers. A real web developer, web engineer, what ever you want to call them can write code from scratch and debug it with no outside help.
Mario Peshev wrote a great post Don’t Call Yourself a Developer If You Don’t Code on how the term web developer is being used to loosely and the pool of developers is a lot smaller than the industry shows. Mostly because people say they are developers that can’t actually write code.
It’s a shame because it gives potential clients that don’t know the difference in the use of the term “developer” a bad taste when their project goes horribly wrong.
The difference between the Real Web Developer and WeekEnd Warrior
For businesses a website is one of two things:
#1 an extension of their business or
#2 their actual business.
Either one of those is an effective tool for your business in creating revenue in any number of ways.
Don’t sell your business short by not making sure you have a real web developer that can get the project completed correctly.
A “Weekend Warrior” will generally build your site (project) by using pieces found around the web and mash them together to try to complete the projects tasks. In the case of WordPress that probably means putting a package together that includes a bunch of free plugins and theme or maybe they splurged and bought a couple “does all” premium themes and plugins. Then when they hit a wall, (big problems), they go to internet communities for help because they can’t write code or debug.
If you go this route just make sure you are not paying $50,000 for off the shelf $100 dollar products someone else created. I see this way to often!
The Real Web Developer will do the project in a completely different manner. Not to mention have actual custom code experience Web Development Projects.
In my case the first step is notes, in a notebook, not hitting the web to see what I can scrounge up. I write my list of goals in the project. Then break it down into manageable milestones/tasks or just tasks if it’s a smaller project.
From this point each task is mapped out (flow chart style) on a white board and broken down even further…
Get where I am going with this, lots of planning (hours, days or even weeks) of very important planning that saves money in the long run.
When we build the project, guess what? We write code to fulfill the goals and complete the tasks that we mapped out. If at any point a bug is found, we debug, fix it and if needed write unit tests to make sure it stays fixed.
At the end of the day there are a very select few plugins that I use from WordPress.org. Only because they are well know, server one purpose, I test them everyday on my own sites and there is no reason to re-invent them. Everything else “requirements for the project, tasks, etc…” I write the code from scratch, custom to the clients needs and tailored to the client’s business for both their custom theme, plugins or what ever the project requires.
After all it’s not always WordPress, but most of the time it is 🙂
If you have a project for your business or organization that you would like to discuss, get in touch.