what's up everybody it's Joe from IWD Agency we do design
development and marketing for e-commerce brands today
we're going to go over 10 things to consider when you're picking
a magento developer i've been doing magenta development for over 12 years
now i was working with magento since the alpha
beta version and a lot of experience with botched
stores and implementations that just have not gone well
a lot of people pick their magento developers or
their team to work on their projects without too much consideration
not understanding the complete complexities of magenta
while magento is a very strong platform very feature-rich it also has
a learning curve a pretty difficult learning curve if you don't build your
magenta store the right way from the ground up you're
going to run into a lot of hurdles moving forward
and many hurdles that you're going to live with for years to come so when
picking your team and picking a rejected developer
you know make sure that you pick the right people to build the foundation of
your store and build it correctly because it's
going to be with you for a while just like if you were
building a building or a house or something like that you want to make
sure the foundation is good you have a development team that's not
experienced with magento and they're familiar with other
platforms but the structures are going to be completely different
so you could run into many issues with your store moving forward so coming up
10 things to consider when picking your magento developers
the last one is really one of the most important ones but
we'll start with number one and go from
there okay so the first thing you want to look
for when picking a magenta developer which is pretty obvious to the magenta
community but if you're new to magento you might not be so
familiar with it but make sure that your team is magenta certified magento has
different levels of certifications the main ones that you'll
you will want to look for is if they're a developer
are they a magenta certified developer if they're a front-end developer
with a magento front-end certified developer
if they are a project manager a solutions architect
or a business analyst do they have the magento specialist certification
it's important as well to make sure that they're using magento's
standard functionality and not trying to reinvent the wheel magento has
hundreds of features built into it a lot of people don't know
all the features that are built into it natively and so you want to make sure
that you're not adding additional functionality
that's already part of the platform that you have
this will overburden your system plus it'll be
more difficult to upgrade it is very important that your developers
and everybody on the team has these certifications so they really understand
magento front and backwards because if a developer is not developed
being the magento core principles you're going to have problems with performance
you're going to have problems with upgrades you can have problems with
adding different functionality into your store
magenta should be built in a certain way that allows you to upgrade your store
without having to rebuild the customizations on your store
so it's very important that they follow the correct standards and
the way to make sure people are following the correct standards is to
make sure they have the basic understanding of magenta
the second important factor that you want to consider when picking a magento
team is to review the contract make sure you
have a contract i know that a lot of times you'll start an agreement or start
work with the team and you have all butterflies and rainbows
and everything's great and happy but when stuff doesn't go well what are
the procedures what will happen how do you go your different
ways if you decide you want to go with another team then
what you do it's always good to have that written always good to have a
contract we've seen you know development teams try to hold
um stores hostage from store owners even though the
sorener had paid all their bills and and just wanted to go separate ways then
they didn't have a contract to say who actually owned
the code or the store who actually owned the the
environment and so you want to make sure you have all that contract so that
whenever you have to separate ways or there are times of difficulties that
already have written down the the rules of the agreement
third thing that's very important of kind of standard
project management is to make sure you agree on your timelines
and the functionality before you start our project this is very important
it's very easy for timelines to get missed or
teams to get sidetracked on different types of work so
if you can agree before you get started with the work saying
hey in six months we need this functionality done
then that will help the progress and make sure that everybody's on the same
page before you get started with the work
also it's important to have milestones throughout the project to have
miniature milestones where you're getting delivered pieces of the project
that way you can make sure the project is going smoothly
and everybody's on the same page you don't want to wait six months down the
road and get a deliverable and not be anything
close to what you're expecting so having small milestones on the way is
always very helpful as well the fourth thing you want to consider is
consider time zones and when will be appropriate times for
meetings and for communication especially if you have a foreign team or
you have people working in different parts of the world
this is very important that you have at least some part of the week or some part
of the day where you can sit down and go over questions
can be very frustrating for clients and for development teams to
lose days or even weeks with back and forth with questions when you could
sit on a call and go through them in 30 minutes or hour
you have to have clear times when where both teams can meet and go through the
different requirements the requirements settings and all the questions that you
may have or they may have it's very easy to go back and forth with
emails with questions about a project and not getting the full
answer or misunderstanding the the information so
it's always best to have clear times where
you can set set up meetings and that both teams are available
the fifth one is to make sure you have all of your
project plan and all your design done before you start development
this is very important and imprudent to make sure
you don't start you know building your house before all your
plans are set plans do change in any project uh functionality and
scope creep are likely to come in but the more you have planned up
front the smoother the project can go the more that the development team will
understand what will be expected from them from day
one and they can build it from ground up the more things that you change on a
development team as you're building the store the more
complex it will be the more that due dates will change the more that will be
harder to hit the expectations of the client so make
sure as much as possible to work with your solutions architect to detail
all the requirements of the project fine tune as you can
make sure you work with your designer to design all pages of your website
all break points as well it is very important to have this all detailed
before starting development because you don't want to have to be
chasing your tail or running in a circle trying to figure it out while developers
are actually building the store so make sure you have the foundation and
planning done before you start development
number six is for your development team or your freelancers
or whoever you decide to pick to do your development for your project
make sure to know who is going to be responsible for
quality assurance and testing there are so many different browsers and screen
sizes that different pages of magento that
you're going to need to test and regression test
and it's not very prudent to just have one person or one developer test
everything you're going to want to make sure that
you have a tester on your team to make sure to go through
all the pages all the functionality and to report back on making sure
everything is done and before you jump into a project this
makes it's good to make sure to know if the
team that you're choosing has that built in or if you need to hire a second
quality assurance tester it's always prudent to have this
going on and you can do acceptance testing
as the project moves forward and then do a full regression test at the end
you need to make sure that you do a full test of the store before you go live
magento has a lot of different functionality and so you want to make
sure to test all of that especially if you're
building custom functionality on top of that
number seven is to be cautious of trying to get a developer to be a jack of all
trades while many developers are amazing and
they can do amazing work to expect a developer to do everything
from front end to design to database architecting to setting up
your server to custom logic to api integrations it's
a ton of information to know and it's really
hard for a developer to be good at all of them
so a lot of times you have a team segregated by people that are
responsible for front end development back-end development database
integration api integration and so you want to make sure that your
team is well stacked if you're picking one developer to do all your work for
you just be cognizable they might not be as good in certain areas and be patient
with them also acknowledge that a team of
developers is always going to be stronger than a
single unit and the factor is that if a single developer and a team get stuck
on a issue or problem they can go to the team and
get support and help if you have a single developer working solo
then it might take them longer to debug a problem
or find the answer to it well as if you once again if you had a full team
of 20 or 30 developers they can lean on other developers as they get stuck
on a issue that they can't resolve number eight
is do you need ongoing support and assistance with your store if so
make sure you pick a team that can handle this
uh do they have a ticketing system do do they or do they have another support
team that can help you with questions and training
uh you know store is a living breathing uh site it's uh there's a lot of stuff
always changing on the internet there are always new devices there's always
new browsers there's always new updates to magento
don't expect to just build your store and be done with it
if you need a support team and you don't have that on staff
make sure the team that you pick has the capabilities of doing that
number nine is similar to number eight is will you need marketing assistance so
there are many teams that are more technical focused
there are some teams that have a full service agency
if you already have a marketing team and house then maybe you need a team that's
more technical focus but if you need marketing as well make
sure to consider that when picking your team
it's always good to have it all in one house so that you don't have finger
pointing and the team that you pick is
responsible for the results if they're saying that they can get you
certain rois or or growth then you can look to to
them for those results in my experience when
you pick a separate marketing team and a separate development team there's a lot
of back and forth and miscommunications a lot of times if the
marketing team isn't hitting their goals or their
deadlines then they sometimes point fingers at the development team and vice
versa so having it all under one roof is helpful
if you need that capabilities of your agency so if
you're considering doing development and
marketing you know one consideration is is the
team that you're picking capable of doing both of those number 10 is very
important it's sometimes forgotten about but
make sure that you get along with the team that you're picking make sure that
uh you the communication is clear and they understand your business
the team that you're going to be working with is likely going to be working with
you for many of hours many weeks and maybe even many of years so
you want to make sure that it's a team that you get along with
that you can communicate well with that you know you enjoy working with you
don't want it to be a us versus them ideally you want it to
be a team culture where you're building something amazing
together the more that you get along with the team
the better results in my experience that you'll get from your project
so those are the 10 things you should consider when picking your magenta
development team if you like the content make sure to
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you'd like to add and we'll see you next
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