Outsourcing Your Design Coding Tasks – What to Look For!

Are you looking into hiring an outside firm to code your designs into either xhtml/css, a WordPress theme, Drupal, Joomla or other CMS Formats?

The trend is becoming popular to have graphic designers outsource to companies that specialize in coding designs. There are benefits to having your design coded by an outside company. If you just want to keep designing and do what you do best, and not worry about assuming the learning curve, then read on.

You should though, look into every possible resource for when it comes to finding the perfect design coding service to take care of your needs. Although the path to finding the best coder around is going to take trial and error, taking a few guidelines from below will help you curb some error and weed out the bad and possibly find the coding service that would best suit your needs as a web designer.

1. PORTFOLIO
First of all, is the guy new or well experienced. Check out the portfolio and ask for a few website to see how the work checks out. If the site looks crummy, it might not be the fault of the coder, as the design might not be something of web caliber. But then again, would a design coding service ever put up something that was crappy? Not really.

Have a look at their sites and make sure everything that you are looking for in terms of quality stands up to what the coding service claims it delivers.

2. REFERENCES
Usually a portfolio for some is fine to look at. For some, you have to dig deeper and maybe talk to a few of the clients that the design coding service has dealt with in the past. If the design coding service has an issue giving you references, maybe they are offshore, low profile or just do not do a good enough job for their clients. This should put up a red flag and steer clear from them!!!

3. SUPPORT
Just with any good product or service, the vendor should supply support and be able to answer a question within a reasonable amount of time. Maybe not within seconds, but within a few hours if email is the preferred medium of communication. And it should be great support. If the vendor has an attitude or doesn’t like what they do, it will be evident quite quickly.

4. WORKING TIMEFRAME
At CodeFromPSD.com, we give every one of our clients a timeline, most of the time, 72 hours or less. Two problems do arise with timeframe issues. For one, some coder just suck with timelines. But the thing is, we are not designers, we are coders. If we have enough experience, then we should know how long something should take and give or take sometimes a bit longer or shorter. If something takes a bit longer than promised, we should be very polite and communicate with the client, just not keep them hanging.

5. COMMUNICATION
This is absolutely a must. Not only are you delivering a service, but you have to factor in great communication as well. With my clients, I insist that I have them chat with me on MSN, Yahoo or AIM and I constantly keep them in the know of what is going on, even if the news is not so great.

I also take time to get to know the customer. Not to get into their lives or find out what type of food they like, but try to build a great relationship with them on a business level. I do want them to come back to me for their coding needs quite often. If you are cold and distant, the customer will not feel like you want them around.

For the designer, look some shiny happy people on the other side. If you think it is impossible, I strongly urge you to seek them out. Yes it is a bit of hard work, but I will tell you that you will thank me later.

But would you want to spend all of that time to have to seek a coding service? Let us at CodeFromPSD.com handle all of your coding needs! Come on! I will give those a great deal for first time customers. Instead of paying $127 for a psd to html conversion, use promo code “INTRO99″ to pay only $99 for your first conversion and “INTROWP150″ if you are looking to convert a psd into a WordPress theme for only $150.

Looking forward to doing business with you!