How to find the best WordPress developers for you: Part 7 – Location

This is the seventh post in a series of posts about “How you can find the best WordPress developers for you“.

Here are are links to the content we have covered so far:

Day 1: Experience
Day 2: Expertise
Day 3: Price
Day 4: Standards
Day 5: Communication Skills
Day 6: Timekeeping

For today’s topic, we are looking at something that is fairly straightforward and that can come with its own set of challenges.

7) Location

Whilst this might be more important when buying a house, the location of the developer can make a significant difference on how smoothly a project runs.

Having a development team who natively speak your language and are on the same time zone as yourselves makes communicating a lot easier and stops you having to wait until the development team starts working again before they respond to your urgent emails about the project (if you follow this guide then there shouldn’t be any need for urgent emails, but you get my point!). However sometimes using a developer from another country may be a more cost-effective way of building a WordPress website. Remember…

“Your developer is writing code, not writing you a letter in your native language”

You will need to weigh up whether the development team needs to be available when you are working or are you ok with waiting a few hours for a response. For bigger projects, it often makes sense to work with a team that mirrors your’s and your clients hours. Smaller projects may mean you have more freedom about the location of your developer.

Questions to ask:

• Where are you based? – This is often a nice ice-breaker as a lot of people like where they live so you are enthusiastic about talking about their location.
• What are your hours of work? – This is really important as if the hours the developers work and your hours only overlap for a couple of hours a day and your client needs regular updates then this may become a problem.
• Are you contactable outside of these hours in emergencies? – You may not need this depending on how smooth the project is run. It is an important question to ask as it will give you an indication of the developers boundaries. If they say no, it doesn’t mean they are bad developers, it may mean that they have a good work-life balance and want to keep it that way.

In the next post in this series, we will discuss how the ‘size of team‘ your choose can be important.