A web developer's role can include a variety of jobs. Depending on your developer's experience and skill set you may need a specialist for some or all of the jobs listed below.
Your web developer can generally help you set up your server, install any appropriate software packages, and help get everything set up. It's important however that you be the one to initially set up the web hosting account, then set up your developer as the development contact. This way, if you change developers later down the track, you'll have everything you need.
Some developers operate their own hosting (usually on-selling a hosting company's white labeled services). You should always avoid these in favor of setting up your own account directly with a hosting provider. Locking yourself in with a developer in this manner can make changing developers difficult.
Your web developer's main job is, of course, to actually build, install, and customize your blog's theme.
If you need specific functionality on your blog, your developer may create or customize plugins or small applications to help you achieve that. They will usually need to tweak your site's theme and install them for you as well.
Optimizing a site for search engines is generally a very specialized job with an entire industry catering to it. However, one aspect that your web developer can help with is ensuring that your site is well-structured and uses markup that search engines like. For help with search engine marketing, link building, and general optimization you will probably need to find a specialist provider.
There is often ongoing work maintaining a blog that comes in the form of upgrading to new installations, patching plugins to ensure they are compatible, and fixing bugs that may crop up.
You may also require help with your server from time to time should you have problems with spam, freeing up resources, moving web hosts, and so on.
An important step when setting up a blog, particularly a WordPress one, is to have appropriate caching. This helps your blog perform under traffic pressure by reducing the number of times it hits the server. Basic caching plugins are relatively easy to install, however more advanced plugins like W3 Total Cache provide much better caching but are quite difficult to set up for someone without much web experience.
It's incredibly important to have solid backup systems in place for your blog. If you don't and your site is lost somehow, you have pretty much forfeited your entire business.
It's best to have at least two levels of backup in place. Optimally, you should have a backup service with your web host, and a second that backs up your site from your web host to another location. On top of these two levels, it's not a bad idea to periodically download the contents of your blog to your own hard drive using the export function that most blogs provide.
Your developer can help you set up backup systems and then to regularly test them out. A backup system that has never been tested is not much better than no backup system at all.
Setting up a blog is actually a pretty simple development task, which is why sometimes web designers will do it for you. If you need custom development, which can range from setting up a membership site to building a web app to installing other software products, then you should speak to your developer to find out what is involved.
Generally the bigger the project is, the harder it is to cost and estimate. If you decide to develop a large application, expect to pay a lot and for it to take a long time. There's a saying that whatever a developer says a project will cost and however much time it will take, you should double it, and double it again, just to be safe!
If you have the good fortune to build a very successful and popular blog, you will at some point need help managing your server. Generally, you have to get pretty big before caching plugins and hosting upgrades cease to do the trick, so this probably isn't a problem to worry about until you are large enough that it starts manifesting. You will usually see the issues coming from a long way away as downtime begins to mount and you start noticing that your server is getting less responsive during peak periods.
One other advanced task that may unfortunately crop up if your blog becomes popular, is that of security. Generally speaking, simply keeping your blog software up to date will guard against most attacks. However, now and again sites will be attacked using either vulnerabilities in the CMS software or through a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, which means your server gets so many requests it can't handle them all and falls over.
There's not a lot you can do to guard against some types of attacks, particularly distributed DoS attacks and they are only likely to happen if your site is popular and targeted for some reason. Still, in the event that something happens, it's good to have a developer to work with, to help either stop the attack, or at least bring the site back up afterwards.
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This article was sent to us by:
Cynthia Simmons at
02152011
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