Working with a remote WordPress developer might sound challenging if you’ve never done it before. Yet hiring remote WordPress professionals is becoming a pretty common method in today’s global economy. Why’s that? It’s cost effective, it enables you to tap into the best WordPress professionals’ experience all at once, it helps you scale your business requests. All in all, it’ll be a valuable new skill to learn for business and website owners like you.
All sounds cool, but how can anyone take advantage of it?
In this post, I’ll guide you through all the steps towards being a pro dealing with WordPress experts working on your website or project and you’ll be able to start right away!
What do you need when you work with a WordPress developer on a project? [Step-based framework]
Step 1: Define your budget
You set a budget for almost every activity in your life: lunch, vacation, clothes and the like. Just as you might expect to pay your plumber to fix your pipes in your home, you need to have some money set aside for your project. Working with remote WordPress experts shouldn’t be different. If you have no clue about what something is going to cost you, you could do some research upfront to gather at least a budget range or jump on a 1-hour consultation and ask an expert his/her insights on that matter.
Step 2: Sit down and set goals with clear outcomes
Take some time to clearly understand what your final goals are and start listing them down. This might be done by you alone or through a couple of meetings with your coworkers. What’s important here to understand is, before you even start looking for WordPress developers, you should have a crystal clear picture of what you want to achieve so there’s no wasting of your resources. Improving your website speed, increasing your leads, making content more shareable are perfect examples.
These goals you’re setting up at this stage will be “translated” into small tasks or bigger projects which your WordPress expert will take care of. Setting up goals with specific and detailed outcomes will also make the whole process easier to manage, and thus more likely to get completed in a timely manner.
Step 3: Define deadlines
Deadlines are the timeframe you need a specific task or project to be delivered. Would that be in the next couple of days? A week maybe? Or something super urgent? Just be clear on that aspect and share it with your developer. One benefit you might be missing here is that a deadline allows the developer to set realistic expectations, and both you and the developer will be able to better plan your schedule and resources.
Step 4: Bundle all up in your brief
One of the most powerful ways to attract the best remote developers to your project is writing an in-depth project brief with all the information at your disposal. Specifically, try to convey and communicate all that you need in a detailed written project description. And when you don’t know how to explain something or don’t know the correct technical term for it, add links, screenshots or any other resources that might help to show exactly what you mean. For example, try pairing any element of design you’d want with a comment or pick examples from websites, books, sketches and add them as further resources.
What to write and avoid in a project brief
Writing your project brief is a key activity you should invest time on because it directly relates to the outcome you’re paying for. That’s why other than putting all the previous types of information together, there are proven sentences that you should avoid using:
“This should be easy”
“This should take very little time”
“I know this can be done in X hours”
“I already have a quote on this for X amount”
“I hope you understand that there are way more jobs to come, so please be frugal on quoting”
Paying attention when it’s you who’s hiring (paying) them?! You might think I’m crazy, but that’s a common misinterpretation of working with remote developers.
At the end of the day, it’s you who are looking for and need someone to help you out. Not the other way around. And each time you write one of those sentences in your project brief, most probably as an honest mistake, you’re lowering your chance to have them start working on your project. Those sentences are big red alert words professional WordPress experts keep away from.
Now that you know all the info you’d need to add into your project brief, along with specific sentences to avoid, let’s go even deeper with some real project brief examples.
Example of a WordPress project brief for a Website Custom Design
Current Website
What’s the project deadline?
12/30/2016What’s the goal behind this site redesign?
Increase lead generation numbersWho is your target market?
Solopreneurs selling online courses related to time management in the New York area.Aesthetics examples for opt-in forms and landing page
http://www.example1.com/
http://www.example3.com/I like them because of their simplicity and I’d like to have the same on my website.
I don’t have brand or style guidelines, so as long as the logo and look and feel is consistent, all is good.
**Additional Information**
The main goal is to have a set of 5 landing page templates that I can easily create, edit and push to live with different opt-in form connected to my MailChimp account.
Example of a WordPress project brief for a new eCommerce store
We’re about to launch an eCommerce store for [sample items] and would need a new website from scratch. We like these websites (www.example1.com – www.example2.com) and would like to populate our homepage with a grid-based page made from our best-selling items that automatically refresh every 24 hours.
When the website is completed, we want to be able to edit, update and add content to in-house. We don’t have any SSL certificate set up, so please consider this as well.
SEO, speed performance, and conversions are top priorities for us.
Currently, we don’t have any hosting provider preference and we’re open to suggestions.
Step 5: Things you need to prepare upfront
This is the last step before start working with a remote WordPress expert and it is more about prepping rather than actually doing. Even if each project and request tie to a specific scenario, there are common elements that you’d need to keep in handy so the project doesn’t get delayed. Here are the top 5 things you should be able to collect upfront:
- Login credentials for your current website
- FTP logins and URLs
- Other tools or services you’d need the contractor to look at or work with
- Graphic assets such as your logo and imagery material
- Content such as copy for landing pages, your homepage, product descriptions, menu items, etc.
Wrapping things up
Working with remote WordPress developers and designer has proven to be highly beneficial for businesses, no matter how big or small they are. Now that you know everything you’ll need to start working with one of them, your business can benefit too!
So post your project here and have our world-leading, experienced and thoroughly vetted WordPress developers take care of it immediately!
Note: posting your project is completely FREE. Once experts provide you with their estimates, you’ll be able to see what you’re going to pay for the entire project.
