Freelance web developer recommendations
January 31, 2020 3:41 PM Subscribe
A company I work for would like to hire a contract web developer to replace a creaky old website. The project would essentially be to duplicate the existing functionality using a modern codebase and design. Can you personally recommend anyone, either specific developers or a hiring service like gun.io or Scalable Path?
The site is not very complicated (~14 pages, some of which are static and most of which are simple) and was written in procedural PHP without a framework. It's relatively low traffic, and scalability is not an issue. The visual design will mostly be lifted from the larger corporate site. We would do it in-house but all of our developers are fully tasked and this doesn't justify a new hire.
We would strongly prefer for the redesign to be in (modern) PHP or Python, so that it can be handed off for future maintenance in-house. Some key considerations:
1. Best practices, including front and back-end tests and thorough documentation.
2. Reproducibility of the output. Part of the site is a faceted search with basic statistics on the results. We need to be sure, via automated testing, that the redesign will produce the exact same results as the original, bug-for-bug if necessary.
3. Design for the future: the current site has stood for over a decade. We would like the redesign to last a similarly long time, at least in its general form, so ease of maintenance is important.
In a nutshell: we're looking for someone that can be meticulous and disciplined and deliver a rock-solid, easily maintained product based on some dodgy legacy code. There is the potential for a more complex follow-on project. The budget is flexible. We are willing to pay for this kind of quality if there is a proven track record behind it.
If there's a person, company, or service that you have personally used and been happy with, I'd like to hear about it. If there's one that you have personally used and been unhappy with, I'd like to hear about that too. "Have personally used" can also include maintaining the code the freelancer wrote, even if you didn't hire or manage them originally.
The site is not very complicated (~14 pages, some of which are static and most of which are simple) and was written in procedural PHP without a framework. It's relatively low traffic, and scalability is not an issue. The visual design will mostly be lifted from the larger corporate site. We would do it in-house but all of our developers are fully tasked and this doesn't justify a new hire.
We would strongly prefer for the redesign to be in (modern) PHP or Python, so that it can be handed off for future maintenance in-house. Some key considerations:
1. Best practices, including front and back-end tests and thorough documentation.
2. Reproducibility of the output. Part of the site is a faceted search with basic statistics on the results. We need to be sure, via automated testing, that the redesign will produce the exact same results as the original, bug-for-bug if necessary.
3. Design for the future: the current site has stood for over a decade. We would like the redesign to last a similarly long time, at least in its general form, so ease of maintenance is important.
In a nutshell: we're looking for someone that can be meticulous and disciplined and deliver a rock-solid, easily maintained product based on some dodgy legacy code. There is the potential for a more complex follow-on project. The budget is flexible. We are willing to pay for this kind of quality if there is a proven track record behind it.
If there's a person, company, or service that you have personally used and been happy with, I'd like to hear about it. If there's one that you have personally used and been unhappy with, I'd like to hear about that too. "Have personally used" can also include maintaining the code the freelancer wrote, even if you didn't hire or manage them originally.
I, too, do this professionally myself. Take a look at lightweight CMS solutions like CraftCMS and see if it could support most of the site’s logic. I specialize in CraftCMS and Rails projects.
posted by andreinla at 11:23 AM on February 1, 2020
posted by andreinla at 11:23 AM on February 1, 2020
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posted by humboldt32 at 6:52 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]