One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get as a startup is this:

Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure.

I’ve heard this advice over and over and over at startup events, to the point that I got a little sick of hearing it. It’s not wrong. Putting aside the fact that every single other startup in the world who heard this same advice before you is already out there frantically doing everything they can to hire all the best people out from under you and everyone else, it is superficially true. A company staffed by a bunch of people who don’t care about their work and aren’t good at their jobs isn’t exactly poised for success. But in a room full of people giving advice to startups, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in that room:

It doesn’t matter how good the people are at your company when you happen to be working on the wrong problem, at the wrong time, using the wrong approach.

Most startups, statistically speaking, are going to fail.

And they will fail regardless of whether they hired “the best” due to circumstances largely beyond their control. So in that context does maximizing for the best possible hires really make sense?

Given the risks, I think maybe “hire the nuttiest risk junkie adrenaline addicted has-ideas-so-crazy-they-will-never-work people you can find” might actually be more practical startup advice. (Actually, now that I think about it, if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops, perhaps you should email me.)

I told that person the same thing I tell all prospective job candidates: “come with me if you want to live”

— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) May 24, 2015

Okay, the goal is to increase your chance of success, however small it may be, therefore you should strive to hire the best. Seems reasonable, even noble in its way. But this pursuit of the best unfortunately comes with a serious dark side. Can anyone even tell me what “best” is? By what metrics? What results? How do we measure this? Who among us is suitable to judge others as the best at … what, exactly? Best is an extreme. Not pretty good, not very good, not excellent, but aiming for the crème de la crème, the top 1% in the industry.

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Pursuit of this extreme means hiring anyone less than the best becomes unacceptable, even harmful:

In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, “A players hire A players; B players hire C players” – meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you’ll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) — Guy Kawasaki

There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do? Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink. — Jon Soberg

Why am I so hardnosed about this? It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people’s time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It’s just a bad scene.

On the other hand, if you reject a good candidate, I mean, I guess in some existential sense an injustice has been done, but, hey, if they’re so smart, don’t worry, they’ll get lots of good job offers. Don’t be afraid that you’re going to reject too many people and you won’t be able to find anyone to hire. During the interview, it’s not your problem. Of course, it’s important to seek out good candidates. But once you’re actually interviewing someone, pretend that you’ve got 900 more people lined up outside the door. Don’t lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates. — Joel Spolsky

I don’t mean to be critical of anyone I’ve quoted. I love Joel, we founded Stack Overflow together, and his advice about interviewing and hiring remains some of the best in the industry. It’s hardly unique to express these sort of opinions in the software and startup field. I could have cited two dozen different articles and treatises about hiring that say the exact same thing: aim high and set out to hire the best, or don’t bother.

This risk of hiring not-the-best is so severe, so existential a crisis to the very survival of your company or startup, the hiring process has to become highly selective, even arduous. It is better to reject a good applicant every single time than accidentally accept one single mediocre applicant. If the interview process produces literally anything other than unequivocal “Oh my God, this person is unbelievably talented, we have to hire them”, from every single person they interviewed with, right down the line, then it’s an automatic NO HIRE. Every time.

This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. And I’m not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don’t think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.

If your hiring attitude is that it’s better to be possibly wrong a hundred times so you can be absolutely right one time, you’re going to be primed to throw away a lot of candidates on pretty thin evidence.

Before cofounding GitHub I applied for an engineering job at Yahoo and didn’t get it. Don’t let other people discourage you.

— Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt) May 22, 2014

I’ve been twitter following the careers of people we interviewed but passed on at my last gig.

Turns out we were almost always wrong.

— Trek Glowacki (@trek) January 26, 2016

Perhaps worst of all, if the interview process is predicated on zero doubt, total confidence aren’t you accidentally maximizing for hidden bias? Perhaps the reason this candidate doesn’t feel right is because they don’t look like you, dress like you, think like you, speak like you, or come from a similar background as you.

One of the best programmers I ever worked with was Susan Warren, an ex-Microsoft engineer who taught me about the People Like Us problem, way back in 2004:

I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them (“People Like Us”). In this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It’s just human nature.

As one reply notes, diversity is good. I’d go as far as to say it’s awesome, amazing, priceless. But it’s hard to get to — the classic chicken and egg problem — if you rely on your natural tendencies alone. In that case, if you want more female MVPs to be invited you need more female MVPs. If you want more Asian-American MVPs to be invited you need more Asian-American MVPs, etc. And the (cheap) way to break a new group in is via quotas.

IMO, building diversity via quotas is bad because they are unfair. Educating folks on why diversity is awesome and how to build it is the right way to go, but also far more costly.

Susan was (and is) amazing. I learned so much working under her, and a big part of what made her awesome was that she was very much Not Like Me. But how could I have appreciated that before meeting her? The fact is that as human beings, we tend to prefer what’s comfortable, and what’s most comfortable of all is … well, People Like Us. The effect can be shocking because it’s so subtle, so unconscious – and yet, surprisingly strong:

• Baseball cards held by a black hand consistently sold for twenty percent less than those held by a white hand.

• Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased women’s probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by fifty percent.

• Denver police officers and community members were shown rapidly displayed photos of black and white men, some holding guns, some holding harmless objects like wallets, and asked to press either the “Shoot” or “Don’t Shoot” button as fast as they could for each image. Both the police and community members were three times more likely to shoot black men.

It’s not intentional, it’s never intentional. That’s the problem. I think our industry needs to shed this old idea that it’s OK, even encouraged to turn away technical candidates for anything less than absolute 100% confidence at every step of the interview process. Because when you do, you are accidentally optimizing for implicit bias. Even as a white guy who probably fulfills every stereotype you can think of about programmers, and who is in fact wearing an “I Rock at Basic” t-shirt while writing this very blog post*, that’s what has always bothered me about it, more than the strictness. If you care at all about diversity in programming and tech, on any level, this hiring approach is not doing anyone any favors, and hasn’t been. For years.

I know what you’re thinking.

Fine, Jeff, if you’re so smart, and “hiring the best” isn’t the right strategy for startups, and maybe even harmful to our field as a whole, what should be doing?

Well, I don’t know, exactly. I may be the wrong person to ask because I’m also a big believer in geographic diversity on top of everything else. Here’s what the composition of the current Discourse team looks like:

I would argue, quite strongly and at some length, that if you want better diversity in the field, perhaps a good starting point is not demanding that all your employees live within a tiny 30 mile radius of San Francisco or Palo Alto. There’s a whole wide world of Internet out there, full of amazing programmers at every level of talent and ability. Maybe broaden your horizons a little, even stretch said horizons outside the United States, if you can imagine such a thing.

I know hiring people is difficult, even with the very best of intentions and under ideal conditions, so I don’t mean to trivialize the challenge. I’ve recommended plenty of things in the past, a smorgasboard of approaches to try or leave on the table as you see fit:

• On Interviewing Programmers
• The Non-Programming Programmer
• How to Hire a Programmer
• The years of experience myth

… but the one thing I keep coming back to, that I believe has enduring value in almost all situations, is the audition project:

The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.

What I like about audition projects:

• It’s real, practical work.
• They get paid. (Ask yourself who gets “paid” for a series of intensive interviews that lasts multiple days? Certainly not the candidate.)
• It’s healthy to structure your work so that small projects like this can be taken on by outsiders. If you can’t onboard a potential hire, you probably can’t onboard a new hire very well either.
• Interviews, no matter how much effort you put into them, are so hit and miss that the only way to figure out if someone is really going to work in a given position is to actually work with them.

Every company says they want to hire the best. Anyone who tells you they know how to do that is either lying to you or to themselves. But I can tell you this: the companies that really do hire the best people in the world certainly don’t accomplish that by hiring from the same tired “only the best” playbook every other company in Silicon Valley uses.

Try different approaches. Expand your horizons. Look beyond People Like Us and imagine what the world of programming could look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years – and help us move there by hiring to make it so.

* And for the record, I really do rock at BASIC.

[advertisement] Building out your tech team? Stack Overflow Careers helps you hire from the largest community for programmers on the planet. We built our site with developers like you in mind.

Working on very different projects, in different teams and with different people can sometimes be a challenge. But one thing that works out remarkably well is doing retrospectives with your team.

In retrospectives, you talk about how a certain project went, and the whole team shares what problems/challenges they faced, what was good and what was annoying people, why people were unhappy. And after each person has written this down on a wall (you can use Post-Its), you try to find useful solutions, small improvements that avoid conflicts, that avoid people feeling bad in a project, and that avoid unnecessary stress situations. Ideally, you do this often — like every two weeks. In every team so far, talking about issues and addressing them has helped to bind the team together and improve future work. Let’s work more together in our teams instead of on our own.

The post Web Development Reading List #127: jQuery 3, UX Research And XSS In Ads appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

You can use CSS3 to add blur, shadow, brightness or contrast to an element. Overall, there are ten filters available. The SVG format knows filter effects as well. Partially, these options overlap, for example when it comes to blur. However, the SVG format knows several additional filters that CSS3 alone can’t create. With little effort, you can add any desired SVG filter to an HTML element.

These SVG Filters Exist

While CSS3 has a total of ten different filters, the SVG format offers 19 of them. For example, there’s “”, which mixes pixels on an image with adjacent pixels. This creates a smudgy effect similar to the motion blur in Photoshop. Using “” allows you to apply a Gaussian blur, while “” makes sure that the pixels of an image are thinned or thickened.

Original Image and the Applied “” Filter

You can use the filter “” for different color manipulations, for example to alter an image’s saturation, hue, and brightness.

The two filters “” and “” allow you to add lighting effects like diffused or reflected light to a picture. With “”, “” or “”, you can define different light sources.

Image With Lighting Filter

There are several other filters, some of which are rather unspectacular, “”, which only moves an image, and some of which are rather special, like “”, which creates turbulences and fractals.

Creating and Applying SVG Filters

If you want to apply SVG filters to any HTML element, all you need to do is set the filter itself via SVG. This should be done within the “” section. It is made for elements like patterns, flows or filters, meaning elements, that are not visible but applied to other elements. Also, filters need to be placed within the “” element.

<svg>
  <defs>
    <filter id="blurryexample">
      <feConvolveMatrix order="20, 1" kernelMatrix="1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1" />
    </filter>
  </defs>
</svg>

In the example, the filter “” is set. The attribute “order” defines how many adjacent pixels on the x- and y-axis should be included. In the example, only pixels on the x-axis are mixed, which creates motion blur. The values defined by “order” form a matrix – 20 times 1 pixel in this example. “kernelMatrix” is used to define the values of every pixel of the matrix. As our matrix only consists of one line, 20 values need to be defined for this line. Values for further lines would be set divided by a comma.

Picture With Motion Blur

The filter needs an ID in order to be applicable to other elements within the HTML document. Afterwards, you need to transfer the SVG filter’s ID to the CSS3 attribute “filter()”.

img {
  filter: url(#motionblur);
}

In the example, the filter is applied to all “” elements. You need to be aware of the fact that the attribute “filter” only works with a fitting vendor prefix on some browsers.

While modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox support the option of applying SVG filters to any element, this doesn’t work on Internet Explorer, and Microsoft’s new browser Edge (yet).

Combining Filters and Applying Them to Texts

Of course, you can also combine filters. To do so, simply set multiple filters within one “” element.

Picture With Motion Blur and Hue Changes

<svg>
  <defs>
    <filter id="motionblur_huevalue">
      <feConvolveMatrix order="20, 1" kernelMatrix="1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1" />
      <feColorMatrix type="hueRotate" values="-90" />
    </filter>
  </defs>
</svg>

In the example, the filters “” and “” are combined. The latter makes sure that the hue rotation (“hueRotate”) of 90 degrees is achieved via “type”.

Text With Motion Blur

As mentioned in the beginning, the filters not only work for pictures, but for all HTML elements. This allows you to create interesting text effects. When applied to a heading e.g., it could gain a motion blur effect.

Examples on Codepen

• SVG Filter: Motion Blur
• SVG Filter: Motion Blur and Hue Rotation
• SVG Filter: Lighting

(dpe)

Today’s net-savvy customer is used to user-friendly websites. However, sometimes this experience might be hampered due to slow speed and malware infections. These and other issues can be tackled by utilizing efficient web hosting. Though various types of web hosting are available in the market, VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a perfect choice as it is an amalgamation of shared and dedicated server.

• Need for right web hosting plan

Hence, VPS proves to be a better choice in eliminating maximum risks.

? VPS – Probably the best!
A VPS host allows full access to resources. Although there is a single physical server, it partitions itself to run numerous virtualized operating systems like Windows and Linux.
This indicates that though other OS share a similar environment, every user gets a dedicated server. VPS hosting is thus profitable and facilitates clutter-free working of the site.

To understand it better, consider:

• Thus, VPS presents best of both the services and hence it is the most sought after option. It gives you access to all the resources that you pay for without creating any interruption due to other users.
• The flexibility to run any OS also provides usage of applications like MySQL. The protection of files against malwares makes it secure even on a shared virtual platform.
• It also facilitates customization of services enhancing its usage as a stand-alone server. The choice of independent reboot is one of its popular highlights.

Ideal Solution for your Online Business

A slight issue with hosting can affect a website’s traffic drastically. Hence, use of a reliable VPS hosting for start-ups and small business online ventures, not only assures smooth functioning but also protects it from malicious access, and profiting. With individual resources and room for flexibility, it offers users, the peace of mind without adding the expenses as in a dedicated hosting.

Read More at How VPS Hosting Can Benefit Your Online Business

Mac-based typophiles rejoice! Bohemian Coding have smiled on you in the form of a new Sketch update. Where before there were inconsistent baselines and sadness, there shall now be great-looking text, and joy.

Now you can really get some mileage out of your Helvet… Oh, we’re not doing that anymore? Okay.

The point is that Sketch has gotten a pretty extensive set of improvements to the way it handles text in general. Since Sketch is about designing for the Web, and the Web is mostly text, this is a pretty vital thing to get right.

It’s all about the baseline

According to the guys at Sketch, the biggest improvement they made had to do with making text baselines behave the way users expect. To accomplish this, they had to delve into the way fonts are constructed and displayed in the first place.

In the fonts themselves, they had to deal with ligatures, and swashes. Then there are diacritical marks: the carons, cedillas, accent marks, and more. Basically, measuring the space between lines isn’t as simple as looking at the capital letters and saying, “Yeah, but that’s all we need, right?”

Then there’s the fact that different fonts handle all of those different things… well… differently. And sometimes, you want to use more than one font in a paragraph; at least, you want to be able to, even if you don’t actually want to do it.

Turns out that Apple’s text system doesn’t do uniform baselines on its own. Even if you set a specific line-height, the actual line-height gets calculated differently based on every font. When mixing and matching fonts, that can go wrong.

The people at Sketch have taken each and every one of these factors into consideration in their new update to make typographical baselines work right.

Lastly:

when changing fonts for text layers, we’ve gone to some lengths to preserve the position of the first baseline, so your text layers will no longer jump around vertically when changing between fonts.

Though the type system of Sketch has been improved, the devs have asked us to remember that they can’t replicate the way type looks on every browser or operating system. They’re all different, so that’s just never going to happen. Their focus has mainly been on making making their software more pleasant and useful.

This is reportedly only the first of several type improvements this year, let’s hope they’re all as useful.

LAST DAY: Designer’s Vintage Studio – Over 200+ Retro Resources – only $27!

Source

When you exist in the digital space, it can be hard to make a connection with your offline target. Especially if you ONLY exist online, and the only way people can find you is by being connected to the web or through word-of-mouth.

As an ecommerce company ourselves, with a lot of ecommerce clients, making the connection between your online business and your offline potential customers is a problem we’ve encountered time and time again. So how do we overcome this barrier? With stickers.

Stickers have a higher ROI than any of your current marketing channels for your ecommerce site. Here’s how:

Low Cost to Produce

The cost of stickers usually depends on your material, your size, and the quantity you order. There are some companies that have no minimum order quantities (like StickerYou!), but most companies require you order at least 250 stickers to start. Most sticker-manufacturing companies also have bulk pricing allowing you to buy more at a lower price per sticker. Meaning, in some cases you can order 1000 stickers for mere cents per sticker.

Easy to Source

There are many, many companies that offer custom sticker printing. Some have added effects like more durable materials, better print quality or custom contour die-cutting. Stickers are a fairly fast item to turn around and require little planning on your part, past quantity, size, shape and material.

Not Just for Kids

Few people can resist a good sticker design. Even adults. Stickers by nature have a viral, collectible quality to them. If you have an attractive sticker design, and they are easily accessible, people will want them. What do we mean by “easily accessible”? Give them away for free at events or in packages. Do not make it too difficult for your clients, customers or fans to get one of your stickers. You want them to take your sticker because once they have your sticker, they become an evangelizer for your brand.

Create a Buzz

Once your customers have your stickers they will stick them up somewhere. It could be on their laptop, water bottle, on a guitar case or a street pole, doesn’t matter. Once they are stuck somewhere they begin gaining impressions. Your sticker with your branding is in plain sight. The more and more people see your sticker the more they are curious about your company. Assuming your web address or other information is on the sticker itself, it should be pretty easy for your new customers to find information about you. Depending on how many stickers you gave out and where, you may find hundreds of people visiting your site, all for the mere cost of few cents per sticker. Successful companies who have done this: Imgur, Reddit, Smoke’s Poutinerie, Monster Energy Drinks, Feel Your Boobies Organization, to name a few.

We are a sticker printing company ourselves, so we may sound incredibly biased in this recommendation. However we are also an ecommerce company who built our following and customer base from the ground up. We did this with stickers. Today we help thousands of small business clients running ecommerce sites who have found a fun, easy way to drive traffic to their sites- through stickers.

Read More at Stickers: The Highest ROI For Marketing Your Website

The fonts collected here are designed using the geometric shapes. Their smooth clean lines and perfectly rounded angles create a sense of completeness in design.

Using the geometric shapes results in elegant and modern look of every letter. These fonts can be used for headings as well as body text. Thanks to their sleek design they fit any clean minimalistic designs so popular these days. So, scroll down and download these free geometric fonts to use in your future design projects.

Walkway

MANIFESTO

Big John / Slim Joe – FREE Font

Moon – Free Font

Metrophobic

PIER FREE TYPEFACE

BUILDING

Moderne Sans

SIMPLIFICA

Jaapokki

AVENTURA

Slot

FAKEDES

Timber

River Oak

Anders

ONE DAY

Monastic

Jack Font

Tritio

Read More at 20 Gorgeous Free Geometric Fonts to Download

Hey Guys, who doesn’t need a professional script font that makes your graphic designs standout from others? Here’s a generous font bundle from our friends at DreamBundles. With this deal you’ll get 30 professional fonts with extended licensing!

This bundle contains world-class fonts that are long time best sellers such as Octavia Script, Steelheart Script and Adelicia Script. There’s also a lot of fresh new comers like Shrewdy Brush Script and Christmas Beauty that will bring your designs instantly into 2016. On top of that you’ll get ton of high quality, unique and eye-catching fonts that are guaranteed to make a lasting impact.

Only Available for a Limited Time!

DreamBundles is offering you a 98% discount on these must-have fonts between March 1st to March 31st 2016 only. You’ll get full access to a professional graphic fonts bundle originally priced at $1296 but cut down to an unbelievable $29, this month only. Get the deal before it’s over.

Make your graphic works standout with these impressive fonts and amaze your audience on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or wherever you might needs these quality fonts. This pack will never again be available for this price, not even close to it.

Typographer’s March Dream Bundle

Read More at 30 Stunning Script Fonts + Commercial License

Slack recently released its 2016 product roadmap, and the one feature that has everyone talking is the introduction of voice and video calls.

Yes, you can say, in a way, that Slack will soon be offering functionality similar to Google Hangouts or Skype.

Slack intends to first offer voice chat on desktop versions, followed by video calls.

Among other things, Slack has also planned formatting aids for text chat, such that you chat by means of a WYSIWYG editor. As can be seen, Slack’s primary focus now is to foster better communication and in turn, head towards even better collaboration among members of the team. By means of voice and video chats, as well as better text chat, Slack aims to offer enhanced productivity by enabling team members to communicate in an efficient and better manner.

Slack currently has 2.3 million daily active users, which technically speaking, is hardly a number comparable to major social networks. However, Slack is not a social network by any standards, and for a productivity and team collaboration tool, these numbers are definitely impressive.

As of now, Slack offers integration with third party apps and services, such as Skype. However, it is obvious that users have to flip back and forth across applications — users might be forced to get on Skype or Hangouts for a quick call or video conference. By offering such features within its interface, Slack can further cement its place as a collaboration and productivity app, and also make its users’ lives much easier.

What do you think of these new planned features for Slack? Share your views in the comments below!

Read More at Slack To Soon Offer Voice And Video Chat

Steven Trwoga wrote to me with a perfectly reasonable question:

I have an idea for a website I would like to have built. I believe it would fall into the category of “large project”.

I have spoken with, and been quoted by some web design agencies in the UK. However I am not convinced by what I am being told in terms of what can be built and cost.

I have no experience in web design, but I have spent a lot of time reading to help me grasp what can be done and to get a sense of the scale of the project.

I find it to be a minefield trying to find a web designer (or team) by just using search engines.

What advice could we give Steven?

I certainly know some web design agencies. I’ve worked with Sparkbox recently and that was pretty great. Just last night I met with some folks from Graydient Creative where I live here in Milwaukee and they seemed like good folks. In the UK I think of Clearleft.

There are thousands more.

But first, this reminds me of a current situation I’m in. I want to redo the front porch on my house.

I know what a porch is, but I don’t, like know about porches. I don’t have a good grasp on what porch renovation costs. I don’t know exactly what I even want, other than that my current porch looks kinda crappy and I want to make it more beautiful and more useful.

So I’m in the position of hiring some kind of porch company. Are there porch companies? All I can do is web search for stuff and ask around. I have a few leads, but I’m not even equipped to evaluate who is a good lead and who isn’t. I’m going to have to do a lot of meeting and talking.

We can probably look at our situations similarly.

Do you have a plan?

Two things: a vision for what you want to do and a budget.

You think that this new web project is a good idea and will benefit you.

But how firm is that vision? That might affect who you hire. If I had full schematics and blueprints of the exact porch I wanted, I’d probably be hiring a construction company who just exactly complies to my firm plan.

In my case, I want a porch company that guides me through a process. I don’t know exactly what I want, so I want to be guided there, involving me in that process.

If you have a mockup and exact plan of what you want, you should be upfront about that when hiring an agency and you are hiring them to build a thing you have a firm plan for. Some may be into that, some may not. “Discovery” and “research” are a big deal to some agencies, and aren’t into jumping into projects where they don’t use the full process they normally use and believe in.

How do you know exactly what you even want?

You’re thinking website, but maybe when you explain your idea to an agency, they think native app. Are you open to that? Maybe what you’re doing, a Facebook Group is actually what makes more sense. Who is using this thing? Why? Where? How?

Hopefully the agency can guide you through the choices you’ll have to make.

Like I said with my porch, I don’t know what I want. I hope they can show me other interesting porches. I hope they can tell me what considerations people normally have with porches. I hope they can use their experience to make smart decisions on my porch that I would have never thought of. Does my water main come in under my porch? I have no idea, but I hope they do.

How do you know which things affect cost in a big way and what doesn’t?

I don’t envy this position.

I know that with my porch, the materials are going to have a big effect on cost. Different types of bricks; different types of wood. It’s the same amount of work to lay cheap pine slats or lovely cedar planks. That, I understand.

With web work it’s so much harder to wrap your head around.

A static website is a long way away from a customized CMS is a long way away from a site with public users that processes data in some custom way.

I imagine my porch will have cost variables that I don’t even understand yet. Maybe scheduling is a big deal? Maybe the existing porch factors in in a big way? Maybe access to the porch affects what kind of equipment they can use and that’s a big deal. I don’t even know yet.

I hope we get to work with people who can explain these things to us very clearly.

How do you know they are any good?

I guess we’ll have to look at their portfolios.

Just as importantly, I’d like to feel like they are strong communicators, have my best interests in mind, and come recommended.

Will the result be drastically different depending on who you choose?

Probably! Isn’t that scary? I know it is for me. We can’t A/B test entire projects. We’re going to have to do our due diligence and then trust our gut and go for it.

What would you suggest?

Do you have more considerations for Steven? Recommendations?

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How The Heck Do You Hire a Web Design Agency? is a post from CSS-Tricks