[This is a draft for later]
As soon as I’ve started working on websites, I’ve received lots of inquiry to: first, create small website for NGO, then give advices to find the right developer/CTO for whomever startup.
Developing websites for NGO
That was my first web development experiences. I was happy to help, it gave me “good” ideas to practice what I was learning at the university. So I’ve stated with some Wordpress, for my Bordeaux prayer group: www.aeb.fr (the best part was the negotiation I had to manage to get this three letters domain name, but this is another story), and then for this same group when they wanted to organise their move to World Youth Days in Madrid: jmj33.fr (because it’s Journées Mondiales de la Jeunesse in French, and Bordeaux is in the 33rd department).
It was easy, I could do whatever I’d like to do.
Finding a tech guy dilemma
Here come the 💩 complications! Based on my own experience, I can see how complicated and risky it can be to get a contractor. I’ll try to organise the different risks:
- you have not worked enough on your specification, so you let the developer create some part, or just skip some and then you find something different than what you thought.
- you don’t test what your developer is purposing, you skip some details (RSS feed, microdata…) and when you will find out, it will be too late, your dev is already on something else.
- your freelancer find a job or whatever invested him and leave the project. Or he try to continue but he don’t have so much time and motivation left. Project is stuck.
- you don’t have a clue of what’s a framework, so you let your developper choose. After some time, the original developer left and you can’t find somebody who want to take an obscure framework or an handmade one.
The result is still the same, the project is unfinished, or nobody want to work on it, and you finally pay somebody else to redo the whole job, and you might get the same problem one more time.
So maybe contracting with an agence instead of a developper might limit the risks? From my experience, a little bit on the technical part, but it adds another communication layer between your needs and what the developer is doing.
Right now, I can’t really find a solution, nor a conclusion to these questions.